MPs forced to shadow box during scrutiny of estimates –Teixeira

Dec 11, 2016 News

-Says transparency and accountability will be sacrificed on the altar of expediency to pass 2017 budget

By Kiana Wilburg
The presentations on 2017 budget debate are finally over. From Tuesday, the National Assembly will resolve itself into the Committee of Supply to scrutinize the 2017 estimates of revenue and expenditure for the various budget

Opposition Chief Whip, Gail Teixeira

agencies.
However, members of the Opposition are concerned that this exercise will not be as effective as it should. They opine that the books for agencies for this year are not closed and will not be before December 31, 2016.
The members of the PPP noted that during the Committee of Supply, Government ministers are questioned on the projected spending for the new fiscal year and are often called upon to account for spending for the previous year.
Specifically, Opposition Chief Whip, Gail Teixeira, said that this line of questioning will be undermined since central, regional and local government and statutory bodies and agencies are still spending. As such, what are in the volumes of the estimates are not actual close of books figures but “guesstimates or incomplete figures.”
“The figures we in this House shall be scrutinizing are incomplete. In fact, we will be examining guesstimates of some date unknown in the month of November which is prior to the Budget speech being presented,” Teixeira contended.
“In fact, we shall be shadow boxing during the estimates as the 2016 budget would not have been completed and revised upwards or downwards …This has the makings of something sinister as transparency and accountability will be sacrificed on the altar of the expediency to pass this budget.”
Teixeira said that she is of the firm view that the government simply wants to get over the Budget as quickly as possible, and use their one seat to railroad and ram down the throats of the Guyanese people, almost 200 tax measures in a matter of 10 months between the 2016 and 2017 Budgets. She said that this situation is reminiscent of the taxation budgets of the late 1960s.
The Opposition Chief Whip maintains that there is no desire on the part of the government to respond to the criticisms and concerns expressed by the broadest cross section of this society ever seen since the 1980s.
“Yet the Government remains aloof, in some bubble somewhere, inaccessible, invisible, and even their speeches in the House, they ignore and refuse to explain its own tax measures,” she said.
The Opposition member commented that a Budget provides the financial support to a policy framework of where the country is going in the next year.
However, Teixeira asserted that the policy directions of the 2017 Budget are ambiguous at best and bereft of any vision. She said that its foundation is based on a concept of the “good life” which is nebulous at best and fraught with subjectivism and devoid of empirical performance measurements, assessments, and data driven benchmarks.
Teixeira said that an economy doesn’t expand and diversify by platitudes but it will decline when taxation measures drive the costs of production to levels which make it unfeasible to continue.
Unfortunately, she said that the government has woven such a web of deception that its members have fallen prey to their own fallacies and its only defense is to create a “messianic shield around themselves to protect and defend a draconian, repressive, retrogressive budget” which will do nothing for growth and development of this nation nor improve the quality of life.
She maintains that the government must withdraw the budget.
“There is time to redesign it with the assistance of national stakeholders and remove the repressive, retrogressive measures. There is still hope for our people and country; the government must not lose this opportunity to put them first,” expressed Teixeira.
She said that if the government fails to redesign the budget then as the Ram and McRae analysis of the budget 2017 stated, “Guyanese can expect a rough ride in 2017.”

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