Where is the forensic audit of the GRA?

May 02, 2018 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Don’t ever believe that the average Guyanese does not have a plausible working knowledge of national happenings. They are not experts, of course, but they read and understand.
I was at the Bourda Green buying vegetables and this gentleman reminded me of unfinished business. He recalled that last year I mentioned in one of my columns that I was driving after leaving my mechanic in Bel Air village and Khurshid Sattaur, former GRA tsar, stopped me and kept ranting, and he uttered things that in the article I chose not to divulge.
This stranger wanted me to expose Sattaur, by disclosing what Sattaur echoed while his face was in my car window. “What do you want to know that for?” To which he gave the following answer; “but Freddie why you of all persons want to protect a man like Sattaur?” I intoned that when Sattaur sues me then out of the 1200 lawyers you have in Guyana, only Nigel Hughes will come to my rescue and I do not want to bother Mr. Hughes; he has done enough for me.
I left the gentleman with some advice. He should go to President Granger or the Finance Minister and insist that the long promised forensic audit of the GRA be done ASAP, and when that happens, Guyana will see how Sattaur ran the GRA and who paid taxes, who didn’t pay taxes, and who were sacred cows in the eyes of the GRA under Sattaur. Let’s talk a little bit more about the GRA under Sattaur.
It was the expectation of every citizen, including, I believe, decent persons who voted for the PPP but nevertheless frowned on corruptibility in public office, that there would have been criminal investigation into several public institutions after the APNU+AFC administration settled down. Their expectations were not dashed. There have been dozens of such audits. Citizens had two on their list of choices – NICIL and the Guyana Revenue Authority.
NICIL is done and dusted. But where is the probe of the GRA? Its exigency should be on the top of the Cabinet’s agenda because of what the GRA’s boss, Godfrey Statia has stated. Let us quote from the news item in Kaieteur News of Saturday, April 7, 2018 of page 11 in which Mr. Statia flowed; “The Commission’s 2016 report also noted that the total revenue from over the past nine years only amounted to $14.4 billion at an average of $6.6 billion per year.” That is vivid testimony of post-colonial failure of Guyana.
If you examine Guyana’s stock exchange, you will see that this country has about a dozen public (public not meaning state owned, but private with shareholders, e.g. DDL, Banks DIH etc) companies. The evolution of the business world in this country was along the line of family ownership. Enormous wealth is in the hands of families. These include wharves, manufacturing facilities, large scale agriculture, huge retail outlets etc.
Now let’s do some elementary accounting. Prior to 2014, property tax was payable on the assets of each citizen on assets (meaning bank accounts, properties, stocks, bonds, jewellery, lands, cars, tractors, machinery and yes, things like books) starting at $7 million. It is outrageous, given the concentration of wealth in private hands, for the state to have collected $1.9 billion each year going back from 2013 and further down the years from property tax. That is a horrible indictment of the collapse of the post-colonial state.
Long before the property tax regime was changed from $7 million to $40 million (in 2014), the media reported on a case in which one of two well-known brothers in business here was involved in litigation in a Canadian court, claiming he was owed two million American dollars. He is just one example where if you use him as a standard for property tax collection, the state could not have hauled in a meagre $1.9 million each year. It begs the question; what was Khurshid Sattaur doing?
Guyana has been a heavy borrower from the IDB and other multilateral institutions, and over the years the results have been a heavy debt burden. But why beg for money that you can reap right here in Guyana?
A simple analysis which a trainee accountant can excel in is, given the kind of private wealth outlay this country has, and given the fact that prior to 2014, you had to pay property tax on assets worth more than $7M, then Guyana’s employed working classes bore the brunt of tax collection. If Godfrey Statia’s statistics are correct then Guyana is a failed state.

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