Not too many people bother to bat an eyelid these days when a public announcement is made about the uncovering of a corruption-related occurrence at the Guyana Revenue Authority (GRA).
Indeed, notwithstanding Commissioner-General Khurshid Sattaur’s frequent fulminations about the authority’s determination to stamp out corruption – to say nothing of the checks and balances and systems that have been put in place to stamp out ‘runnings’ in the GRA – there are those who believe that there is no given moment during which some ‘hustle’ is not either being hatched or executed inside the authority.
The various private sector organisations have not been particularly mindful of speaking ill of the GRA in public. At the same time those individuals – whether they are merchants seeking to uplift consignments of goods imported into the country or some well-to-do individual seeking to be spared the full extent of duty on a luxury car – who have become part of the GRA corruption problem, would obviously have no interest in taking action which, in effect, would compromise their own interests.
Some private sector functionaries, who have spoken with this newspaper about the problem of corruption in one or another department of the GRA – off the record, of course – relate their own particular experiences with the culture of corruption that obtains at the GRA. They express the view that the very nature of the authority that lies in the hands of the GRA means it will attract underhand dealings. Indeed, rather than see the shenanigans that obtain as either inappropriate or illegal, they have come to regard them as simply a way of life. If you require a matter to be expedited, a regulation to be overlooked or a procedure to be circumvented, you can do so if you are prepared to pay your way.
During a recent conversation with a businessman on the subject of corruption at state agencies he actually made the point that corrupt practices can become so commonplace that after a while they cease to be seen as a wrongdoings and come to be regarded quite simply as “the way things are done.”
There is a familiar ring to the latest duty-free scam reportedly involving the importation of vehicles. From all appearances the scam involves a network of functionaries spread over several departments. We are told that it involves bogus official letters and forged signatures designed to facilitate the granting of duty-free concessions for high-performance cars.
What we find interesting is that there does not appear to be any particularly high level of sophistry or ingenuity associated with this latest racket and yet, it seems, it persisted for some time before it was finally uncovered.
From what we know of the GRA – and based on what the Commissioner-General has been saying from time to time – the authority has, over the years, been engaged in continually upgrading those systems and mechanisms that have to do with protecting its integrity and in this regard one expects that those initiatives will benefit from the lessons that are learnt from each incident.
If it is not in our place to trivialize the degree of sophistry involved in this latest scam, it comes as more than a mild surprise to us that it can succeed – at least for some time – before it is uncovered. Was there never any occasion on which one of these bogus letters actually appeared to someone in the GRA to be bogus? Did none of these forged signatures of senior GRA officers ever appear forged, even to the executing individuals and departments whom, presumably, would have been familiar with those officers’ signatures? And was there never an occasion on which any of these applications for duty-free concessions appeared sufficiently suspicious to the processing officers to cause its veracity to be tested?
The GRA has said what it had to say about this latest occurrence and as we mentioned earlier the familiarity of such tales means, in effect, that what the authority had to say is not news. Scams inside the GRA are commonplace. This of course is not to say that the official accounts of these occurrences are not taken with a pinch of salt and that somewhere in the recesses of their collective minds people are not viewing what the GRA had to say with amusement, convinced that the facts go well beyond what is being said and that there is probably more to the story than meets the eye.
