Perhaps surprisingly, the UN Secretary General’s Policy Brief titled “Education During COVID-19 and Beyond” released at the beginning of August and which examines the challenge of restoring education systems, globally, and even seeking to render education delivery more robust, more efficient, in the post COVID-19 era, has not benefitted from a great deal of traction in the media here.
Certainly, here in Guyana, the document, quite possibly the most comprehensive assessment of the negative impact of COVID-19 on education globally and recommendations for ‘righting the ship’ and even setting it on a more certain course, has not, it seems, been the subject of serious examination at the level of either media or the state. This is passing strange since, at least here in Guyana, the issue of the re-opening of schools in a manner that is safe and sustainable, still remains to be settled with the uncertainties of COVID-19 continuing to hover over us like the proverbial Sword of Damocles.
One of the reasons why the UN Policy Document has not realised the sort of traction that it merits may have to do with the nature of its recommendations for addressing the challenge of re-building the global post-COVID-19 education edifice, particularly one specific recommendation with regard to where the finances are to come from to effect the requisite rebuilding and reforms that are necessary.
In addressing the issue of “strengthening domestic resource mobilization” in order to place the rebuilding of the global education edifice as a “top priority” the UN makes one particular recommendation that will test the will and character of governments, including our own. Citing the necessity to “increase the fiscal space” the UN says that there are “several mutual entry points to get there,” following which it bluntly sets the cat amongst the pigeons, pointing to “fighting tax avoidance and evasion” and “revising tax incentives” as viable options for accumulating finances to fund the repair and upgrading of countries’ education systems.
Hopefully, governments and their revenue-collecting agencies, particularly in developing countries like ours, where options to securing finances for rebuilding education are a good deal narrower, will pay some measure of attention to this particular recommendation, since, what we know about tax avoidance in Guyana suggests that over time, and across political administrations the loss of revenue that should rightfully accrue to the state amounts to many billions of dollars and that, in large measure, those uncollected amounts are channelled into individual and family enrichment.
Over time, globally, considerable evidence has been placed in the public domain unveiling how tax evasion and avoidance have become standard business practice. Tax avoidance in poor countries, particularly, have to do, in large measure, with loosely regulated tax systems that have nourished the practice of the creation of mountains of offshore accounts that are ‘protected’ by the countries in which those billions are stored. In some poor countries the practices associated with tax evasion have been much ‘looser,’ some of these blatantly connected with the granting by the state of ‘political favours’ in exchange for generous kickbacks in a manner that is crude and transparent.
Guyana, over time, has had its own fair share of reports of such manifestations, that is to say, tax avoidance rackets that involve collusion between the political system that manages the state and already wealthy business persons prepared to ‘return favours’ in exchange for being granted tax-dodging prerogatives.
OXFAM International estimates that corporate tax dodging costs poor countries at least US$100 billion every year, enough, it says, to provide an education for 124 million children and prevent the deaths of millions of mothers, babies and children annually.
Interestingly, the Caribbean reportedly offers some of the most popular tax havens in the world, providing benefits such as very low tax liability and financial privacy. The Bahamas, Barbados, Domi-nica, Nevis and Barbados number among these. Ironically, these countries, without exception are confronted with severe fiscal challenges financing the restoration of their COVID-19-shattered education system.
The nature of the Guyana tax-avoidance challenge is different. It is regulated to a lesser extent by laws that allow for the avoidance of taxes and to a greater extent by what, frequently, are arbitrary executions of political favours, widely believed to be underpinned by the practice of what is known in Mexico as mordida.
Garnering resources to salvage a Guyana education system that is now unquestionably ravaged by the coronavirus pandemic cannot be realised by extracting more taxes from those who already carry the greater tax burden, proportionately, nor can those resources be realised by resorting to wave after wave of tax concessions as ‘investors’ arrive here anticipating enormous returns on what they ‘put in’ on their minds. It has to begin by curbing what is widely believed to be a local tax-dodging regime that is driven largely by prerogative wrested from the state by those who benefit therefrom and which, it is widely believed, is underpinned by what we in Guyana commonly describe as a ‘hand wash hand’ arrangement in which there are drawbacks for those who give.
It is either we come to terms with the need for government to double down on the leakage of those tax dollars which we now so badly need to help fix an education system that now finds itself in a precarious state or leave it to slide even further. Mind you, in such a circumstance it is those who have no access to options that will continue to bleed.
