Among the various significant and deeply troubling revelations to emerge from the Report on the Customs/Fidelity fraud were those pertaining to the apparent ease with which the co-conspirators were able – over an extended period – to find their way around the various administrative procedures and sophisticated computer-driven safeguards in place at the Guyana Revenue Authority and what the report says was a high level of sheer negligence on the part of some of the Authority’s functionaries operating in positions of responsibility.
Of course, while all this was occurring millions of dollars in what was intended to be state revenue were being diverted elsewhere and it is that fact that raises the issue as to how the various racketeers and incompetents were able to proceed as they did for as long as they did without, it seems, raising any serious suspicions.
While it may well be that the average outsider is not privy to all the complexities of the various checks and balances that obtain inside the GRA in the matter of Customs administration, one is still inclined to marvel over this amazing and costly feat of manipulation and mismanagement.
A particular point of interest in the report has to do with the system of allocating responsibility within the GRA which appeared to assign separate sets of responsibility to the same individual in such a manner as to erode entirely the necessary mechanisms for checks and balances.
In these circumstances one is entitled to wonder whether the report, while dealing with specific instances of culpability on the part of some officers – and, interestingly, setting out a puzzling regime of recommended sanctions – does not, in fact speak to the need for a more holistic examination of the administrative machinery of the GRA and a revamping of that machinery.
An interesting feature of the report is its clear and deliberate targeting of the GRA over what it says was the Authority’s efforts to “frustrate” the enquiry and its citing of a particular instance of that frustration in which instance it actually named the Commissioner General. And even if the report did not say so directly surely one is left to wonder as to whether the ‘bad blood’ that flowed between the investigating team and the GRA during the course of the enquiry may not have had an impact – perhaps a significant one – on both the investigation and its outcomes.
This, of course, is not an attempt to dismiss the report. What it did was to establish beyond doubt that the allegation of a protracted and costly racket involving some Customs officials and Fidelity did in fact take place. That, in essence, was its mandate. But it does more. Certainly, its revelations encourage readers of the Report to raise even more questions than those which the Report answers. More than that it exposes the various serious structural and human resource deficiencies within the GRA, the remedying of which are at least as important as addressing the substantive Fidelity matter.
