Release the tax particulars… Will President Ali?

Sep 27, 2022 Editorial

Kaieteur News – The hope is that President Mohamed Irfaan Ali would respond in a timely and appropriate manner. The President is being pressed to share the details on the tax payments made by his government on behalf of the foreign oil companies (“Civil society body asks Pres. Ali to make public particulars of tax payments made for oil companies” – KN September 24). As Guyanese watch and wait, the first question is how the President will react. The second is whether he will react at all, especially since it is the tricky and thorny issue of Guyana paying the taxes for the foreign oil companies.

We ask these questions because, in the 2-year life of his government, President Ali has compiled a record of hostility to those who raise matters that cause him discomfort. He becomes impatient and angry when he is presented with what clashes with his storybook narratives that have little connection to reality, particularly on compelling issues urgently calling for transparency. We think that this reasonable request to the President to publicize the papers behind the ballooning tax issue of what was paid where. It would help the many Guyanese struggling to follow the trail of the tax payments, as they unfolded from start to finish.

This is to keep everyone honest, and to ensure that proper procedures were followed. This is what the increasingly restive civil society group, Article 13, has gently and formally written to His Excellency President Ali to share with the public. We at this paper want to know, and there are other Guyanese, besides Article 13, who are interested in seeing for themselves what took place, the sequence, and by whose authority. We hope that the President will come through and deliver the related documents. For this would reveal how well and wisely this oil wealth of ours is managed, from the source of the tax funds to the actual payment of taxes on behalf of the oil companies to deposits into the NRF in a New York bank to audits by the State’s Audit Office for verification purposes.

All of this is in the public interest, which has a right to know, and which is the objective behind Article 13’s communication to Guyana’s head-of-state. It is public knowledge that the Audit Office did not do justice by the Guyanese people when it issued “a clean audit opinion on the financial statements of the Fund (NRF) for either or both years (2020 and 2021).” For its part, the head of the Audit Office tried to extract the entity out of this embarrassing situation by taking the position that his institution is only to determine that money was placed in the NRF. By any standards that comes across as pretty superficial, and rather hollow, given that the issue is about tax monies paid into that same NRF.

They are not just numbers, for we think that the Audit Office had a duty to dig for what was behind the monies deposited into the NRF, meaning, it is revenues paid by the oil companies, or taxes paid by the Government of Guyana (from oil revenues) on behalf of ExxonMobil and partners. Further, it is disappointing that the Auditor General attempted to shift the focus to the GRA, the local agency responsible for paying the taxes and issuing associated receipts. At the end of the day, it is his Audit Office that examined the NRF, and the opinion that was issued should have reflected what happened with taxes paid into the Fund. That is, if it was paid or not, with the opinion noting this accordingly.

Taking the above as where things stand currently, the ball is now in the court of the President in the form of Article 13’s writing to him. President Ali has the power and reach to put this issue to bed once and for all. It is our position that the President has only one choice: to put into the public domain, the documents that are being sought. This would be about the transparency that he likes to say he has been about. Now he must prove it by delivering in these curious circumstances involving taxes, the NRF, the Audit Office, and the GRA.