Wednesday’s release from the Guyana Revenue Authority’s (GRA) Law Enforcement and Investigation Division (LEID) that it had seized uncustomed goods valued at $20 million in the month of January would probably hardly have attracted a great deal of public attention beyond the actual newspaper headline. Goods valued a great deal more than a piffling $20 million are smuggled into Guyana, either across our porous borders or through our legitimate ports of entry with monotonous regularity.
This particular seizure is part of what we are told is a “countrywide enforcement campaign,” though it would be good if the LEID could provide us with these numbers on a much more regular basis. This would better position us to measure the extent to which the Customs staffers, who are responsible for that particular aspect of the department’s operations, are actually doing their jobs.
For the moment we can only speculate as to whether February’s seizure figures will be forthcoming so that as things stand a Guyanese public that have become arch cynics in the matter of the operations of the Customs and Trade Adminis-tration (CTA) and the Guyana Revenue Autho-rity (GRA) as a whole are probably likely to see the LEID disclosure as part of a more elaborate plan to burnish the image of an organization that has been ravaged by scandal and has, just recently, lost the services of it Commissioner General under less than happy circumstances.
So that truth be told the seizure of $20 million worth of uncustomed goods in January is, contextually, hardly earth-shattering news and one would be more inclined to the view that customs might have embarked on a journey to change public perception of the manner in which it operates. What is good news, though, is the report from LEID that the illegal Suriname cross-border trade has reduced on account of the creation of in-transit bonds in Suriname, a development that suggests that there is a stepping up of cross-border bilateral efforts to rein in the illegal traders.
Nor is it without significance that the announcement that LEID is clamping down on uncustomed goods comes in the wake of a very recent disclosure that it is becoming increasingly concerned over the shipping to Guyana of consignments of food, milk particularly, which, for health reasons, do not meet the local regulations that qualify these products for sale on the local market. This is not the first occasion on which this newspaper has spoken with the Government Analyst Food and Drugs Department about this problem an d based on those exchanges we have drawn a few conclusions. First, it appears as though the work of the Food and Drugs Department is considerably undervalued so that it lacks the clout to assert itself in a manner that allows it to do its job effectively. Second, there are cases in which importers are able to leapfrog the Director of the Food and Drugs Department and ‘go upstairs’ so to speak to have their business expedited, so that there have been cases, for example, in which milk that ought not to be imported into the country actually ends up being sold either in supermarkets or in one or another black market bazaar. Third – and we are told that this particular situation may have improved somewhat – there has always been differences between the Food and Drugs functionaries and Customs Officers as to whether the latter group, with everything else that they have to do can go poking around on wharves looking for expired drugs or for milk that has had most of its animal fat extracted before being shipped to Guyana. It is just that kind of inter-agency feuding that so often makes public service entities deficient in the quality of their service delivery.
The extent to which goods are being smuggled into Guyana makes it ridiculously easy to come up with $20 million in smuggled goods every month and lay such information before the public as though the Customs is seriously upping its game. Where the real challenge reposes is in detoxifying the environment that has prevailed for decades and which has allowed several more millions of dollars with of uncustomed goods to reach the market without hindrance.
