After the revelations of the Customs/Fidelity fraud the Guyana Revenue Authority has been seeking to send signals to the public that it is keen to close some of the loopholes that have given rise to widespread accusations of various corruption-related scams within the Authority.
The announcement of a new, computerized system for the issuance of GRA Certificates of Compliance is clearly one of the Authority’s moves in the direction of closing those loopholes though one might argue that the recent move to seal this particular breach could perhaps have come much earlier.
While one does not wish to be seen to be “picking on” the GRA the fact of the matter is that what one media house has described as “the track record of forgery” that has come to be associated with the issuance of compliances has been in vogue for a number of years and one would have thought that given the complaints that have been raised by the National Tender Board, for example, the Authority would have moved much earlier to deal with this problem.
The new system of computerizing the compliance forms, identifying the issuing officer and instituting a system of multiple signatories, including the Commissioner himself, is clearly designed to put an end to an old system where the compliance certificates were written up manually and featured few if any safeguards against forgeries. That way, it would have been possible for non-compliant applicants to obtain seemingly valid Certificates of Compliance with relative ease.
One area on which the proliferation of forged compliances has caused much concern is that of the tendering for state contracts. Since there was no system in place for quick and easy verification of the tax compliance or otherwise of the holder of the certificate, the National Tender Board was in no position to rule out those compliances that were forged and which, were they detected, would have disqualified the bids of the delinquent bidders.
There is, of course, a fundamental ‘wrongness’ about a system that does not detect forged compliances since, in the case, of bids for state contracts, the loophole allows the acquirers of those compliances access to the privilege of bidding for state contracts which they ought not to enjoy under the law. The wrongness, of course, is compounded if and when the holder of the bogus compliance secures the contract ahead of the compliant contractor.
The prior requirement that contractors, for example, be compliant in the payment of their taxes if they are to have an opportunity to bid for state contracts is eminently fair and the issuance of compliances to those who are delinquent in their tax obligations is unacceptable not only because it bespeaks corruption but also because it places those contractors who faithfully discharge their obligations to the public treasury at an unfair disadvantage. To acquire a bogus Certificate of Compliance is, plainly put, to indulge in the practice of both plundering and using the state. It is cynicism at its worst.
What the new tamper proof procedures have done (and we must hope that they are, indeed, tamper proof) is to provide some measure of evidence that the GRA is seeking to incrementally close the loopholes that have given rise to the various corrupt practices that have brought the department under unfavour-able public scrutiny. That, unquestionably, is a good sign.
The practice of bogus Certificates of Compliance has also been in vogue at the National Insurance Scheme since both GRA and NIS compliances are required when tendering for state contracts; and while the Scheme and the National Tender Board had worked out an arrangement for closer inspection and verification of Certifi-cates of Compliance more carefully, we are by no means certain that in the case of the NIS the practice has been eradicated altogether. It would be more than a little comforting if this loophole too can be closed quickly. Meanwhile, we must acknowledge as we do the wisdom of the introduction of the regimen for the issuance of Certificates of Compliance by the GRA.
