We note with interest the appeal by the Commissioner of Customs and Trade Administration to businessmen to help put an end to corruption within the Customs department by ceasing the practice of offering bribes. It follows earlier remarks by the President and the Commissioner General of the Guyana Revenue Authority earlier this year which more-or-less conceded that there is a high level of corruption within Customs.
We have commented on this issue before and now that some of the key figures in the Customs process have conceded that bribes and kickbacks are the order of the day at least we can, once-and-for–all, set aside what used to be a peculiarly quixotic official position that customs functionaries were honest and hard-working people and that corruption was, in large measure, a figment of the public’s imagination.
Of course, old habits die hard, particularly – as is the case with Customs – where people derive considerable satisfaction from the prosecution of those habits. That is why Colonel Ramsarup’s call may well fall on deaf ears unless it is attended by long overdue monitoring and sanctions mechanisms aimed at businessmen who offer bribes and Customs Officers who accept them.
It has to be said that one does not get the impression – given the openness with which bribes and kickbacks are paid – that up until now the GRA and its predecessor have really been prepared to put monitoring and sanctions mechanisms in place. Either that or the mechanisms that have been put in place have been woefully ineffective.
That having been said we, nonetheless, welcome the fact that the CTA Commissioner himself has placed the issue in the public domain. One assumes, of course, that he is aware of the fact that as long as the objective conditions for bribe-giving and bribe-taking exist, the practice will not go away. For example, as long as those patently contrived bottlenecks – which customs have become so expert at creating -continue to impede the expeditious clearance of goods there will probably be no shortage of businessmen willing to pay to circumvent that process.
Corrupt officials understand only too well that for as long as they are able to keep those bottlenecks in place money is likely to continue to flow their way and it will be up to the Commissioner to find those bottlenecks – some of which are particularly cleverly contrived – and remove them.
What is somewhat encouraging is that the remarks made by Colonel Ramsarup were actually made at a forum organized by the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry (GCCI) whose President Chandradat Chintamani appears to have decided that tackling the thorny problem of corruption at Customs will be one of the priorities of his administration. Whether or not Mr Chintamani and Colonel Ramsarup can combine their efforts to at least reduce the level of kickbacks and, by extension, the level of corruption at Customs, remains to be seen.
Customs, of course, appears to be faced with a slew of logistical and administrative problems including, according to Colonel Ramsarup, a lack of surveillance capacity and apparent inability – at least in some cases – to determine genuine invoices from fakes. Given the significance of the Customs and Trade Administration as a revenue collection agency and the volume of resources that have been allocated to its operations one is hard-pressed to believe that it has no reliable capacity to determine real invoices from fake ones. One would certainly have thought that there is technology that is available to determine what is real and what is fake and in this particular case the excuse or lack of capacity appears patently contrived.
The particular case of the alleged Fidelity/Customs fraud to which Colonel Ramsarup referred in his presentation continues to be a matter of public concern and there is – at this stage – no really good reason why the findings of the enquiry have not yet been made public. Of course, for as long as the findings of this enquiry remain a “state secret” Colonel Ramsarup’s entreaties to the business community will do little to persuade the public that the CTA is really serious about stamping out corruption.
There is, as well, the wider problem of our porous borders and what has long been the uncontrolled inward flow of illegal goods of one sort or another. This newspaper understands, for example, that dozens of brands of illegally imported cigarettes, alcohol and other products are imported into Guyana from Suriname and that having evaded customs duties, these products have literally laid waste to some legitimate business enterprises. As far as our borders are concerned Colonel Ramsarup has said that there is need for increased surveillance. This is by no means a new revelation and we believe that a point has long been reached where hard decisions must be made about investing in the real improvement of border security by, perhaps, seeking the support of one or more multilateral agencies to secure the resources necessary to do so. The simple fact is that the sanctity of our borders has implications for our territorial integrity, our internal security and our economy and by any stretch of the imagination these three considerations are sufficiently important to warrant more than persistent reference to the problem.
The mere fact that a senior official of the CTA is prepared to discuss the issue of corruption publicly is a step forward in circumstances where in the past there existed a determined official reluctance to admit that such practices existed. We believe that the various umbrella business organizations should publicly associate themselves with Colonel Ramsarup’s call to the business community to stop bribing Customs Officers.
