On lawyers and accountants

May 23, 2019 Editorial

The professional world in Guyana is fluid with training. Within recent times, the focus and sweep have been on lawyers and accountants.
Those are two crucial presences in that thin, or occasion near invisible, line between constitutional rights and freedoms, on the one hand, and the pursuit of truth and justice, on the other. Rather interestingly, and more pointedly, the mandatory training programme involves anti money laundering standards, requirements, and expectations.
In Guyana, it is widely believed that this exercise is most needed, if only to reemphasize the obligations that accompany the licence to practise in those realms.
The world over, attorneys and accountants (auditors, too) are under increasing scrutiny for the wrong reasons: and these reasons have a certain compelling nature about them, as well as an alarming constancy.
These include the perception and reality of income cleansing, income concealing, and income tax evading. In Guyana, these have assumed the proportions of a national scourge, and for which there are only spurious defenses; all these practices have deep money laundering components embedded.
Large people are surrounded by larger sums, which attract professionals cloaked with still larger numerical and verbal skills. Frequently, they are aiders and abettors in spirit, in deeds, in degradation and abandonment of professional standards and obligations. Cook the books condone criminality; perpetuate lawlessness. They cannot hold selves up as civil, constitutional, and political pillars and leaders.
Not when skills and talents are used to circumvent the intents and reach of the law; then expansive societal issues of darker and dangerous sorts flourish. Every foreign agency of standing has indicated ongoing concern at what is known to be (not merely perceived) widespread nefarious practices in the plagues that paralyze a whole country, and yet there is very little discovered, very little found wrong and adjudicated accordingly, very little.
Guarded consensus is that professional practitioners, and those sitting as tribunes in seats of judgment, display greater loyalty to practice and client and supplicants, to the diminishment of law and truth and justice.
Abandoned are the bulwarks of principle and personal calling. The latter two have to be held dear and sacred. The once venerable and well-regarded accounting firm Arthur Andersen was reduced to ashes for failure to identify conflicts of interest, its primary functions, and its uppermost responsibilities. The price was as tortured and final, as it was ignominious.
From professional to plunge to pariah can be a freefall; a terrible force field of waste because of clever games played. In the legal arena. Robert Simmel took things a step too far, many such egregious steps. He did so in furtherance of his client’s interests at all costs and by any means necessary.
Like Arthur Andersen, this can be found laudable when the objectives are idealistic and embedded with regard for adherence to the highest personal and professional ethics. Otherwise, there is only the spectacle of rogue accountants and auditors, who will go to any lengths to see nothing, know nothing, detect nothing, or expose anything. In other locales, they suffer the fate of an Arthur Andersen.
This has not been the case in murky, dismal Guyana, where the client is the be all and end all to success, prestige, prosperity, and durability.
It could also suffice as the passport and password for entrée into certain inner circles, too. Likewise, in Guyana, there are too many in the legal fraternity who have grown comfortable (and bulky through billings) by being imitators versed well in the inclinations of a Robert Simmel.
Conscience is shredded; fairness and balance and right all pale and eventually succumb.

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