A response to Peeping Tom

Dec 28, 2011 Letters

Dear Editor,
Allow me space in your letter writer column to respond to the recent article of the 25th December edition, entitled “WHEN DIPLOMATS SPEAK, POLITICIANS RESPOND” written by your too scared to reveal himself columnist Peeping Tom but using the veil of anonymity, attacks public officers like myself with his arrogance and poisonous pen.
In one section of this article Peeping Tom states the following and I quote from the column, “One of the local contractors has given an explanation as to why some of his projects have not yet been completed and he has cited the slow approval of duty free concessions.
“This has led to an unprofessional outburst from within the Guyana Revenue Authority which really should try as much as possible not to get embroiled in these sort of public spats.
“It is not for tax professionals to be fending and proving issues in the media. It is for the political authorities to be able to defend the tax departments or any other government agency’s handling of a matter. The tax department should therefore never have placed itself in a situation where it became involved in an issue in which a contractor was responding to certain comments from the diplomatic community”
Like most people in this country who are somewhat married to their political past and or are stereotyped in their thinking, Peeping Tom has made the cardinal mistake of associating the GRA with an entity under political control as is the case rightfully so with any other Government agency.
Either the individual who craves anonymity is unfamiliar with the evolution of the GRA having delinked itself through statute from its root origin the former Government Departments, Inland Revenue Department and the Customs and Excise Department respectively, or he or she appears to be suffering from the mental state of amnesia. Since the inception of the GRA when an order was issued appointing a Commissioner-General to manage its day to day operations and a Governing Board to decide on policies, it was the Honourable Carl Singh, then Chief justice at the time, who in his ruling separated the Agency from the Government and removed it from political control.
This momentous decision effectively removed the GRA from being a bureaucratic Government Agency and recognized or ought to regard it as such as, an Autonomous body that is managed by a Governing Board free from the shackles of political interference.
That independence ought to be respected as well as the right to defend the actions of its staff without being subject to the political whims of its tax payers or those who wish to shelter under diplomatic privileges.
The GRA, correctly as it did, should be able to call a spade a spade if it is to fairly discharge its mandate and win over the public confidence in its will to act against political sacred cows as this contractor appears to be.
I do however respect the views of Peeping Tom when he states the following “…This is how these concerns are responded to, not through one person saying that the delays were caused by the delays in processing tax concessions and the tax department responding with a whole deal of unnecessary and unwarranted information…” but to inform your troubled columnist who seems to be rather peeved over the abundance of evidence that strongly refutes the impression that the contractor had wanted to conveniently convey, that I was never aware that the contractor in question was a diplomat as his article caption “WHEN DIPLOMATS SPEAK, POLITICIANS RESPOND” would appear to suggest.
Regards
Khurshid Sattaur
Commissioner-General

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