Providing cash for the criminals

Dec 21, 2013 Editorial

On Thursday, the Ministry of Public Works suffered a major robbery when two men parked in the compound, even consorted with staff of the Ministry, then robbed the payroll when the vehicle transporting it arrived in the compound. The bandits, two of them, managed to escape with nearly $8 million designed for the lowest category of workers in the Works Ministry.
This robbery came on the heels of the police making an announcement that for the period of the Christmas Policing, there had been no gun robberies in the city. The newspapers, always glad to report on something, found this a good headline story. But no sooner had the ink dried that there was this payroll snatch.
The investigators are pondering how it was that the bandits could have known that the payroll would be sent for, that it would arrive at a certain time and that two men would suffice to execute the plan. Indeed there was an armed guard with the payroll but he was rendered useless. Having an armed guard with the payroll must have been the most ineffective in the movement of payrolls. And to compound the issue another weapon with matching ammunition has now entered the criminal kingdom.
All too often people who are more concerned with the job that the other person is doing, is allowed too much information on what really should be of no concern to that person. Staff might have been provided with information that they might have been paid on Thursday but no other detail.
But then again, who can stop a staff member from seeing the preparations? The movement of the vehicle and the armed guard heading to the bank?
However, this incident exposes the backward nature of the Guyanese economy. Such a robbery would hardly have happened in any other country. If they do we surely are not hearing about them. These days companies usually deposit people’s wages and salaries into the commercial banks. When this is not done the worker is issued with a pay cheque.
For years now there has been talk of Guyana moving away from a cash oriented society because of the nature of the world of business these days. There is now an international focus on money laundering, financing terrorism and even taxation. Tax dodgers rely on cash because there is often no record of financial transactions involving cash.
Many people would have walked into stores in the city only to be told that unless there is a cash transaction then there would be no business. Some have gone so far as to induce further cash transactions by enticing the buyer with a lower cost and a falsified receipt.
Thursday’s robbery also highlighted the level of security in a country that takes pride in moving around large sums of cash. Sometimes people can be downright stupid. There was the reported case of a store clerk who was taking $17.2 million to a commercial bank in a carton box.
Who in his right sense would move that kind of money without security, without taking adequate precautions to ensure that the money is moved in secrecy? As fate would have it, two men just happened to know that the young man leaving the store with a carton box under his hand had millions of dollars in this box.
Like the Ministry of Works payroll robbery, this too smacks of an inside job.
The police have been saying that at this time of the year sales would sometimes quadruple so store owners should take extra precaution with their business transactions. If these two robberies, commonplace as they may seem, do not cause a rethink in the use of paper currency, then one can rest assured that long after other countries would have made paper currency almost redundant, Guyanese would still be robbed at gunpoint of their hard earned currency.
Surely the business entity has lost $17 million and that is not tax deductable. We remain penny wise and pound foolish.

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Providing cash for the criminals

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