In a sense the disclosure earlier this week that the Guyana Revenue Authority (GRA) decided to dispense with the services of six of its senior officers including the Deputy Commissioner responsible for the critical Value Added Tax and Excise Department, is probably not altogether surprising.

While the report of the Auditor General into the sensational 2008 Fidelity Polar beer tax evasion scam that robbed the public treasury of more than $300 million had cleared the same officers and recommended their reinstatement, sources close to the GRA had continually insisted that we had not heard the last of the Fidelity saga. Those who apparently were privy to official thinking insisted that the sensational bribery scandal had left a stain of unprecedented proportions on the GRA that had significantly hardened public perception that it was an inherently corrupt institution. It had been further suggested that the findings of the Auditor General’s report had done nothing to quell the clamour among some influential political personages for something to be done to at least reduce the prominence of the stain on the GRA and, by extension of the political administration.

Interestingly, the announcement of the dismissals comes on the heels of pointed criticism of what is felt to be the prevalence of official corruption including the very recent observation in the 2010 US State Department International Narcotics Control Strategy Report (INCSR) regarding media reports that corruption had reached “high levels of government that are not investigated and thus go unpunished.” The State Department Report went on to make the point that while Guyana is a signatory to the Inter-American Convention Against Corruption   (IACAC), there appeared to be no real official appetite for the implementation of some of its provisions including those related to the confiscation of property obtained through corruption.

Of course, it has to be pointed that the six now dismissed GRA officials had all been cleared of any wrongdoing by the report of the Auditor General. While each of them occupied sensitive positions which, it has been argued, placed them in a position where they ought to have known of the unfolding scam, the report, nonetheless, asserted that they were unaware of what was going on at the time.

Up until now there has been no specific reason given for the sackings though – given the fact that they had all been cleared of any wrongdoing by the Auditor General’s probe – the loss of trust and confidence and dereliction of duty are considerations that would probably have been cited when the dismissals were being deliberated. The other issue that arises – given the length of time that it took for the announcement of the dismissals to come – is whether or not the eventual fate of the dismissed officers would not have been preceded by a multi-layered contemplation by functionaries both inside and outside the GRA and whether the final decision may not even have been a political one.

What is no less interesting about the dismissals is that they target two, arguably three officers holding key positions with the GRA, a signal, perhaps, that government is becoming less unmindful of the oft-made public criticism of a tendency towards ‘scapegoatism,’ that is, the practice of targeting relatively low-level individuals for punishment while those in authority escape scotch free.

Of course, the dismissed GRA officers had already been cleared on any wrongdoing in the Fidelity affair and that still leaves unanswered questions as to who exactly were the guilty parties in the GRA affair. Certainly, the officers who have been dismissed had occupied positions that were so critical to the avoidance of the Fidelity scam that the final revelations of the Auditor General’s report only served the deepen the familiar public cynicism associated with the outcomes of investigations into corrupt practices since it was widely felt that they ought to have known what was going on. In the case of one of the now dismissed officers the report actually stated that he should be issued with a warning letter so that his eventual dismissal suggests that he may have been considered much more culpable than the report of the Auditor General had concluded. That having been said the dismissal of the four officers still takes us no closer to learning who inside the GRA were the masterminds behind the Fidelity fraud and at any rate the magnitude of that particular fraud and the subsequent interventions of the President and the GRA have not exactly served to break corrupt practices inside the Guyana Revenue Authority.