Can somebody please explain these issues?

May 24, 2017 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

Guyana can be a highly confusing society. It is the role of newspapers to try to prevent its readers from being confused by explaining the issues behind the news.
Sometimes, the newspapers leave this role up to their op-ed columnists. But even the op-ed columnists cannot, at times, make sense out of what appears to be nonsense.
Charges have been filed against persons who were part of the former Board of the Guyana Rice Development Board. Members of a Board of Directors are a collective. They represent the legal personality of the corporate entity or authority on which they sit. They therefore cannot be charged in their personal capacity but only as members of a collective.
It therefore requires the newspapers in Guyana to explain how it is that select, not all, members of the former Board of the GRDB, could have been brought before a criminal court for offenses.
But what is more befuddling is that the persons have been charged for not recording some transaction in a ledger. This requires some explanation since it’s hard to recall at any time in this country’s legal history that persons have been so charged. What is this charge about not entering something in a ledger?
One would have presumed that the days of ledgers are over. In the old days, there were three main documents in any accounts department. There was the cash book, the journal and the ledger. The details from the former two had to have been classified into the ledger which was used to provide breakdowns on the income stream of an entity.
So that if the entity had five income streams and you wanted to know the aggregate amount of each stream, you would go to the ledger to find this out. The ledger provided a summary of the various transactions.
Cashbooks, journals and ledgers went out of commission with the introduction of accounting software. These days the computer does all the work. It acts as a cash book, a journal and a ledger and can also provide other types of information. This is why there are not many office jobs around these days.
The computer is doing the work which six or seven persons used to do.
The media needs to explain the offence that is created by someone not entering a figure in a ledger. Should the offence not really be the resulting misappropriation, if at all? The charge of not entering a transaction in a ledger is a most baffling charge. The media needs to explain.
But even more confounding is that it was members of the Board of Directors who have been charged for what seems to be an accounts department related issue. The media needs to explain how it is that select persons on the Board of Directors, and not the entire Board, are being held culpable.
The police are said, in another case, to have issued an arrest warrant for a person simply because that person’s name appeared on a document. Anybody can put any name on a document. Does this mean that if this happens that the person whose name appears on the document should have his or her name and image posted on a wanted bulletin? The media needs to explain this practice because it can muddy the reputation of persons.
Asking the ordinary citizen to make sense out of these issues is like asking a four-year-old to solve a calculus problem.

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Can somebody please explain these issues?

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