Later today representatives of the private sector will meet with the Commissioner General of the Guyana Revenue Authority (GRA) and senior Revenue Authority officials to discuss issues pertaining to the relationship between the business sector and the GRA. Those issues have had to do mostly with bottlenecks and bribery and the impact of those on the efficiency and the effectiveness of the commercial sector. This newspaper has spoken to both the Chairman of the Private Sector Commission and the President of the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry (GCCI) about the problems of bottlenecks and bribery and from all that we have learnt the problems persist despite attempts to deal with them at the level of dialogue between the private sector and the Revenue Authority.
This time, the discourse between the two sides will take place within the framework of the National Competitiveness Council (NCC) and when we spoke with the Chairman of the Private Sector Commission earlier this week he sounded particularly upbeat that more was likely to come out of this particular meeting with the GRA than has come out of previous ones. The PSC Chairman – Captain Gerry Gouveia – explained that the Commissioner General of the GRA would be required to report to the NCC on the outcome of today’s meeting which report, presumably, would have to include details of those mechanisms that are to be put in place to improve the relationship between the GRA and the private sector.
Public/private sector dialogue (PPD’s) as the discourses are known is a creation of the highly touted National Competitiveness Council (NCC). The NCC is the ultimate in collaboration between the public and private sectors and the whole idea behind the notion of the National Competitiveness Strategy (NCS) is to create a framework that would allow for a smoother relationship between the state and the business sector that would improve the competitiveness of the latter. PPD’s have already been held between the state agencies responsible for infrastructure, energy and foreign trade and the Chairman of the PSC has told this newspaper that he believes that the outcome of those meetings bode well for ironing out any issues that affect the relationship between the private sector and the state bureaucracy in the aforementioned areas.
In the case of the GRA the business community is likely to attach considerable importance to the agenda and the outcomes of the meeting particularly because the bottlenecks at the GRA end have been long-standing and there has been no real evidence that any of these have been remedied. Private sector entities still complain about the slow pace of customs clearance and the persistence of what they say is the need to offer bribes to customs officials and if the truth be told the GRA appears to be making little headway in staunching the incidence of fraudulent transactions and the disappearance of funds.
Today’s meeting between the GRA and the private sector is being held with the framework of the broader objective of trade facilitation which is part of the overall objective of the National Competitiveness Strategy (NCS).
If there was no mistaking the note of optimism in the tone of the PSC Chairman about the likely outcomes of today’s PPD between the GRA and the private sector we can be forgiven an element of cynicism for a lesser level of optimism though we hope of course that Captain Gouveia’s disposition is well-founded. After all – and Captain Gouveia himself openly admits this – an enhanced public/private sector relationship has to derive from much more than the creation of an NCC. On both sides, the will to change the relationship, to create a genuinely collaborative approach towards decision-making has to evolve if the NCS is to bear any meaningful fruit. The government, for example, must cease to be the ‘control freak’ that it currently is and the private sector must prove to be more assertive about what it believes are its legitimate concerns rather than back away or assume an ultra cautious posture every time an issue – and tax reform is clearly the best example – of some measure of importance surfaces.
For the moment at least we take the PSC Chairman’s word that today’s exchange between the GRA and the private sector – unlike the previous exchanges – will bear some fruit bearing in mind that both public and private sector officials have expressed concern to this newspaper about what they say is the painstakingly slow pace of outcomes of the NCC’s agenda.
