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Yearend 2025 – President and Minister must act on 2022 Census
Business and Economic Commentary by Christopher Ram
Introduction
On November 26, 2025, Stabroek News reported Senior Minister with responsibility for Finance, Dr Ashni Singh, as saying that he was “still awaiting a clear update” on the long-delayed 2022 Population and Housing Census, that he was unsure what caused the delay, and that he intended to raise the matter with the Chief Statistician “very soon.” Such an explanation might pass from an ordinary minister. Dr Singh is not. It might also be excusable if the issue were routine. This particular census is neither. And it might still be tolerable if the delay were brief. It is now measured in years.
For all these reasons, Dr Singh’s explanation is bewildering at best. He has the honour – and the responsibility – of presenting annual budgets exceeding one trillion dollars, allocating resources across an expanding landscape of ministries, departments, agencies, regions, and sectors.
That task demands the most current and reliable demographic and socio-economic data available. It cannot responsibly and properly be discharged by guesswork, political preference, or incremental increases carried over from the past. A population and housing census is precisely the dataset that anchors such decisions. For the Senior Minister responsible for Finance to accept – assuming his account is accurate – a state of affairs in which that foundational data is unavailable, unexplained, and unmanaged is not merely regrettable. It borders on incredible.
The explanation is not merely puzzling in a political sense; it is difficult to reconcile with the statutory framework governing official statistics in Guyana. The Statistics Act does not contemplate an open-ended census process, nor does it permit foundational national data to drift indefinitely without explanation or accountability. Censuses are not peripheral outputs. They are universally regarded as core state functions.
The statutory, governance framework
The Bureau of Statistics does not operate in isolation. It is governed by a Board chaired by the Finance Secretary – who operationally reports direct to the Minister – with the Chief Statistician as Vice-Chair, and comprising senior public officials. Oversight of the Bureau therefore sits squarely within the financial and administrative architecture of the State. Delays of this magnitude cannot occur unseen, unexplained, or unmanaged at that level.
Nor does responsibility end with Dr. Singh. In a move that is unprecedented, was never explained, and is not clearly understood, President Ali has not allocated finance to its own minister. Under our constitutional framework, Finance is therefore retained within the Office of the President, and responsibility for Statistics has been allocated to no other minister. In such circumstances, prolonged non-delivery cannot be treated as an operational mishap. It becomes an executive failure that points directly to Dr. Singh and indirectly to President Ali.
What makes this failure especially troubling is that in response to calls for the report to be published, the public have been fed with a mixture of excuses and promises have been made for the release of the report. This is no longer a single lapse. It is a pattern. Years have passed and another beckons. The Census has now outlived one Board of the Bureau of Statistics and is approaching the end of the tenure of its successor. The impending expiry of the current Board heightens that failure. A governing body chaired by the Finance Secretary, with the Chief Statistician as Vice-Chair, and populated by senior public officials, will have completed its term without delivering the most important statistical output of the decade.
Boards are appointed to govern, to supervise, and to ensure delivery. When a board’s term expires without results, responsibility gives way to accountability – not excuses. It does not roll forward automatically to the next appointment. This is therefore a moment of reckoning. As 2025 draws to a close, the continued absence of the 2022 census cannot be treated as an inherited problem, a technical delay, or a matter awaiting engagement “very soon.” Without the proverbial bogeyman of the PNC or the Coalition, the ownership of this failure – spanning years, boards, and budgets – belongs 100% to the Ali Administration. At year-end, responsibility cannot be deferred any further – it must be owned and acted upon.
Broader functions in peril
What makes this failure even more troubling is that the Statistics Act does not contemplate a single, isolated census. It provides for several distinct censuses and large-scale statistical exercises – including population and housing, labour force, household expenditure and other socio-economic surveys – each separate in scope, but all essential to decision-making, public administration, and management applying evidence-based governance. The Act also gives the Bureau latitude, with ministerial approval, to undertake additional censuses and surveys as circumstances require. In other words, the population and housing census is not the sole output of the statistical system, but the cornerstone upon which the others rest.
The prolonged non-delivery of that cornerstone therefore raises unavoidable questions about the wider statistical architecture of the State. If the most comprehensive, best-resourced, and most anticipated census cannot be brought to completion and publication, what confidence can be placed in the timeliness, reliability, or even the existence of other censuses mandated or permitted by law? Planning on social and physical infrastructure, skills requirements and availability, poverty measurement, household consumption analysis and intercensal estimates all depend, directly or indirectly, on the population baseline. The failure to publish the 2022 casts a shadow over the entire system of official statistics and weakens the informational foundation on which policy decisions are made and national finances are allocated.
There is an additional and more troubling consequence of this prolonged inaction. In the political sphere, the absence of inconvenient data may be tolerable, even advantageous. It allows narrative to substitute for evidence, delays scrutiny, and permits claims of progress to go largely untested. In management, however, the same absence is dangerous. Decisions made without reliable baseline data distort priorities, misallocate resources, and entrench inefficiencies. Political convenience in the short term is almost always harmful in the long run.
Conclusion
As the year draws to a close, this matter can no longer be left to drift. The imminent expiry of the current Board makes inaction dangerously unacceptable. If the 2022 Population and Housing Census is to retain any value, the President and the Senior Minister responsible for Finance must act decisively: appoint a new Board without delay, with a clear and public mandate to bring the exercise to publication within a fixed timeframe.
Anything less would constitute a governance failure that has already persisted far too long.
Property tax regime needs reform and proposed removal should be revisited
Dear Editor,
Mr. Hemdutt Kumar’s letter, “Removal of property tax is a victory for the wealthy and a betrayal of the poor” (Stabroek News, December 20, 2025), is theoretically sound and morally courageous. Predictably, critics will recycle the familiar claim that property tax is widely evaded and difficult to enforce. By that logic, Guyana should abandon almost every major tax. VAT fraud is endemic, income and corporation tax avoidance is widespread, and customs duties haemorrhage daily. Acknow-ledgment of weak enforcement is a call to strengthen administration – not a justification for capitulation.
Before looking at the history of the property tax which President Ali plans to scrap on individuals – ‘to axe the tax,’ as older heads might say – we need to note that “Individuals” in taxation includes professionals, unincorporated businesses, partnerships, and the majority of contractors. This is a huge body of taxpayers. And if the President does keep his promise, retaining it on companies will not have the simplistic effect assumed: all the “one man” and family companies have to do to avoid the remnants of the tax is to de-incorporate. As was the case with the minimum tax.
Guyana once operated a harshly progressive tax system, with marginal income-tax rates reaching 70 percent, reinforced by the National Development Surcharge Levy (subsequently ruled as unconstitutional by the courts). Over time, that framework has been steadily dismantled. Dividends, then taxable, have been made tax-free, estate duty effectively abolished, capital gain is either exempted or taxed at a lower rate than tax on income. And now, property tax – the last meaningful levy on accumulated wealth – is to be removed.
Guyana’s current $40 million property-tax threshold is already generous by international standards. And in computing the tax payable, full deduction of debts and exempted certain assets is allowed. As Mr. Kumar points out, it already excludes the poor.
Other critics will point to countries that have abandoned wealth taxes. They need to tell the whole story. Where such taxes were removed, wealth concentration intensified. What the tax needs is reform, not abolition – least of all at a moment when oil-driven wealth concentration is accelerating. If the measure is implemented, $2 billion plus will go into the pockets of a not-so-new and rapidly expanding wealth class for whom ‘greed is good’ appears to be the governing mantra, a class that visibly includes ministers, their friends, and their families.
Without more, the repeal would also remove the obligation on taxpayers to itemise and declare their assets, leaving mandatory disclosure confined to income alone. And to make a bad situation worse, the country will bear those consequences through taxation, borrowings and drawdowns from the Natural Resource Fund.
I will be personal and direct. This repeal will save me millions of dollars annually. I do not need it. I did not ask for it, and it will make no difference to how I live. In none of the Budget submissions to which I have contributed over decades did I ever advocate for, or recommend, the removal of property tax. I hope the decision will be revisited.
The Property Tax was one of the 1962 measures advocated by world famous welfare economist Dr. Nicholas Kaldor and warmly embraced by the late President Dr. Cheddi Jagan in the 1962 Budget. When the last remaining tax on accumulated wealth is removed, the signal is unmistakable. The burden shifts downward. To present this as “relief for all” is shallow and dishonest.
Sincerely,
Christopher Ram
The $10 Billion NIS Grant: Compassion or Deception?
Business & Economic Commentary by Christopher Ram
Introduction
This column took issue with the announcement of a $10 billion allocation to the National Insurance Scheme (NIS), the Government’s quick fix to decades of weak supervision and administrative failure dating back almost to the Scheme’s inception in 1969. Now, even the accuracy of the sum is in doubt. In the 2025 Budget Speech, the Government stated that it would be “injecting $10 billion into the Scheme” to provide a one-off grant to persons aged 60 and over with between 500 and 749 contributions.
To the ordinary citizen, that language conveyed that a long-standing injustice had finally been addressed and that the NIS itself was being strengthened after years of failure. The ordinary citizen must be forgiven for believing the country’s First Citizen and accepting his announcement.
But viewed alongside a series of prior assurances – the promise to review and renegotiate the 2016 Petroleum Agreement, the promised cash grant before Christmas, the commitment to establish an Anti-Corruption Unit, and the President’s undertaking to ensure the proper administration of the Access to Information regime – a clear pattern emerges. Language is repeatedly expressed in terms of certainty and resolution, only to be later reinterpreted, repurposed, delayed, or quietly abandoned once its immediate political purpose has been served.
After enough such episodes, these assurances cannot be treated as genuine commitments, or even as reliable statements of intention. Delivered at moments of pressure and framed to sound decisive, they have repeatedly had the effect of deceiving the public into believing that action would follow, when experience suggests otherwise.
The $10 Billion question
What, then, does this have to do with the $10 billion “injection” into the NIS?
Appendix C of Volume I of the 2025 Estimates discloses an outward cash flow within the Public Enterprise accounts of the NIS. That Parliament authorised the spending of real money is not in dispute. What is not clear is whether there was any upfront injection at all, or merely authority for payments to be made over time as claims are processed. The Estimates, it seems, describe a payment programme rather than a strengthening of the Scheme.
Given the significance of this much-touted initiative, I sought clarification from the 2025 Mid-Year Report published on November 3, 2025 by the Ministry of Finance, which exercises portfolio responsibility for the NIS. Regrettably, the report was most unhelpful. Making no reference to the $10 billion allocation, paragraph 3.54 stated: “During the first half of 2025, the National Insurance Scheme reported higher collections from contributions of $2.3 billion.” There was no disclosure of how much of the $10 billion had been disbursed, to whom, or by bands.
This omission raises obvious questions about how much of the $10 billion has been paid, how many beneficiaries have received payments, how those payments are distributed across contribution bands, and how the funds are being accounted for. Because the NIS is perennially late in publishing its annual reports – the most recent available being for 2022 – the public is left to speculate about matters that ought to be transparently reported.
Pattern of non-disclosure
That distinction matters because the NIS is a statutory social-insurance scheme, funded by compulsory contributions from workers and employers, and governed by legal duties of transparency, reporting, and actuarial oversight. Those duties have been honoured more in the breach than in the observance. Statutory reports have frequently been tabled several years late, depriving the public of timely information on performance, investments, and sustainability.
The consequences are not abstract. In one case, an elderly contributor waited nearly two decades for an appeal to be heard, only for management to challenge the decision again, despite the long-vacant post of National Insurance Commissioner. Such experiences are not aberrations; they are the predictable consequences of systemic dysfunction.
There is a deeper, structural failure. Although the law requires a five-yearly actuarial review, successive governments have failed to address the 2016 actuarial review warning about contribution adequacy, benefit structures, demographic pressures, and long-term viability.
Systemic and institutional challenges
These failures are rooted in systemic and design weaknesses. The NIS remains effectively controlled by the Government of the day, with ministerial appointment of the Board too often favouring political compatibility over independence or expertise. Without an independent Board, meaningful oversight is weakened and holding management responsible for entrenched inefficiencies becomes almost impossible.
Equally troubling is the legislative stagnation surrounding the Scheme. The National Insurance Act has remained structurally unchanged for more than half a century, despite profound changes in Guyana’s economy, labour market, and demographics. A social-insurance system frozen in legislative time cannot be expected to function effectively in a vastly changed society.
Management also operates under chronic resource constraints that no serious reform effort should ignore. The NIS today serves a contributor and beneficiary base many times larger than when its staffing levels, systems, and physical infrastructure were designed. Without sustained investment in modern systems and adequate personnel, delays, errors, and backlogs become inevitable rather than exceptional.
Conclusion
Seen against this record of weak governance, legislative stagnation, and administrative incapacity, the significance of the $10 billion grant lies not in its size, but in what it leaves untouched. Effective social security is not measured by the size of a headline figure but by its predictability, fairness, transparency, social awareness, respect for contributors’ rights, and, not least, efficiency. Until the NIS is freed from excessive political control, its legislative and governance framework modernised, is properly resourced both physically and technologically, professionally managed, and subjected to genuine actuarial discipline, these problems will remain and become worse.
And the question posed by this column remains unavoidable: is the $10 billion grant an act of compassion – or another opportunistic attempt to gloss over the result of a system that those in authority have long neglected?
Routledge’s black hole of mysterious tax certificates (part 1)
Every Man, Woman and Child in Guyana Must Become Oil-Minded (Column 171)
Introduction
Readers will recall Column # 170 dealing with the request by three U.S. senators to ExxonMobil seeking information on the company’s tax arrangements under the 2016 Petroleum Agreement. Their direct concern is whether the U.S. treasury is subsidising Exxon’s operations in Guyana to the benefit of CNOOC, one of Exxon’s Chinese partners in the Stabroek Block.
Ever since that letter was made public, interest in the issue has intensified – both abroad and in Guyana. At a press conference held at the Exxon’s new Guyana Headquarters in suburban Ogle, hosted by ExxonMobil Guyana’s President Alistair Routledge – sporting the Guyana Arrowhead – the local media, sensing a story that finally had a Washington connection, pressed for answers.
To a question whether Exxon would provide the information sought by the senators – and long sought by the media in Guyana – Routledge was his typical evasive self. “We haven’t applied any tax credits. We are working with the GRA on paperwork on taxes,” Routledge said – an insult to the intelligence of every Guyanese or person of any intellect. That single sentence has opened a window into what may be the most brazen accounting fiction in the country’s history. Unless there is an intent to cook up something, the claim is neither accurate nor credible. It masks a structure so distorted that even its defenders cannot explain.
Before we analyse his response however, let us look at another statement that is blatantly misleading – that the company continues to be cash flow negative on a cumulative basis. Was Routledge unaware that in 2024, the branch distributed some $674,454 Million and still ended the year with more funds than at the beginning of the year?
No credit
Back to the press conference and Exxon’s and its tax practices. Unsurprisingly, Routledge tried to dismiss the drawn-out controversy as the product of paperwork. But what paperwork, he did not say. The Agreement could not be clearer. The Minister pays. The GRA issues the receipt. The obligation is discharged. That is the entire mechanism. There is no “working on paperwork.”
There is only doing it or concealing it. If, six years after first oil, the parties are still fumbling with “paperwork,” it means either the Agreement has not been executed as written or it has been executed but hidden. Either way, it is a national embarrassment.
Accounting credit
While Routledge performs confusion in public, the financial statements of ExxonMobil Guyana Ltd., Hess Guyana Exploration Ltd., and CNOOC Petroleum Guyana Ltd. tell a different story – they are all taking the credit.
ExxonMobil Guyana Ltd. (2024) reports: “Revenue includes non-customer revenue of G$260,155.7 million … relating to Article 15.4 of the Petroleum Agreement,” and recognises a matching income-tax expense. That is the classic gross-up accounting technique: record fake revenue and fake tax so the books look balanced.
As for Hess Guyana Exploration Ltd. (2024), its financial statements disclose that “A portion of gross production … is used to satisfy the branch’s income-tax liability and is recognised as sales revenue.” The Government’s oil becomes the company’s “revenue” and its “tax.”
As for the junior, non-American Chinese partner, CNOOC Petroleum Guyana Ltd.’s financial statements go even further, stating that “The Minister accepts the appropriate portion of the Government’s share of profit oil as payment in full of the Contractor’s income-tax liability.” That language does not reflect Article 15, which requires the Minister to pay the tax to the Commissioner-General of the GRA – not merely to “accept” oil.
Amazingly, in a matter as important as this, none of the companies thought it useful, let alone necessary, to disclose this little inconvenient fact.
The black hole
In all three cases the same pattern appears: the companies book the tax as paid, recognise it as revenue, and enjoy the credit. What happens thereafter is the black hole where Mr. Routledge wants to take us, despite the clear language of Article 15 of the Agreement: The Minister must pay to the GRA the tax charge of the oil companies out of Guyana’s share of oil, is said to pay, the GRA is to issue receipts and deliver “proper tax certificates in the Contractor’s name”.
Article 15 states that the tax must be paid from the Government’s share of oil revenue. Where, then, is the evidence of that payment? The Natural Resource Fund shows no deduction, no debit, no outflow. But no one – including the NRF investment committee and the auditors – seem to care a hoot.
In effect, the tax exists only in the companies’ ledgers — not in Guyana’s public accounts. A phantom transaction generates a real benefit to the contractors, while the Government works on a certificate for a payment it never made.
Confusion
This confusion is not accidental. The Government’s failure to manage the Agreement – or even to understand its workings – has produced a system in which no audit has been completed, no receipts have been verified, and no public officer can explain the basic arithmetic of the contract.
The Commissioner of Information, who falls under the Office of the President, has ignored lawful requests for disclosure. The Minister of Natural Resources has neither published the tax receipts nor accounted for the debits from the Government’s share of profit oil. And nothing coming out from the Guyana Revenue Authority, to suggest that it has received the taxes “paid on behalf of the contractor”. This is the contract that is so sacred that it even trumps the country’s sovereignty, public officials’ integrity and most of all, the President’s thundering commitment to review and renegotiate”.
Even a cake shop, run on a basic exercise book and a lead pencil, would manage its accounts with more care than this trillion-dollar industry. The result is a charade: a government pretending to pay, companies pretending to be taxed, and auditors pretending not to notice.
Next week we will leave Georgetown for Houston, Texas and New York, where the parent companies of Hess and Exxon grapple with the accounting equivalent of the three-card trick outside of Demico House.
EU observers report offers no endorsement of credibility, let alone free and fair
Dear Editor,
In a response to comments made by the Canadian High Commissioner on the final report of the European Union Election Observation Mission, President Irfaan Ali described the September 1st elections as “free and fair, beyond a shadow of doubt,” and that they were conducted “efficiently and reliably.” While the President is entitled to his view, he must appreciate that elections do not become credible merely because a participant proclaims them so.
Notably, the EU carefully avoided using the term “free and fair”, a descriptor which has been replaced by “credible”, when an Elections Observer Mission considers that an election meets basic democratic thresholds. Its report was professionally prepared, evidence based, each finding was supported by tables, graphs and charts based on thorough and objective observations and facts. By contrast, the President offered none. Ali’s own abuse of his office in the pre-election period was egregious and well documented. His party’s misuse of the State media, its apparatus and resources meticulously documented in the EU’s report, was evident to all.
President Ali had no reservations when the EU Mission issued almost identical recommendations in 2020 – very, very few of which have been implemented. It is worth noting too, that despite being a constitutional body, GECOM is not subject to a dedicated financial or performance audit. This is an extraordinary omission for an institution that now absorbs billions annually and is dormant for the greatest part of five years.
It is equally difficult to reconcile claims of “efficiency” with an electoral system that is, by every measurable standard, the most expensive per voter in the world. Guyana continues to spend unprecedented sums to maintain an oversized electoral machinery, yet many of the structural weaknesses identified by both international and domestic observers after each elections remain uncorrected.
GECOM has unilaterally concluded that statutory provisions on election-expense reporting have “fallen into disuse.” In other words, GECOM, which should carry out the law, casually ignores and disregards it.
The voters’ list remains inflated by the names of persons long deceased, even as the law provides for continuous cleansing. The constitutional and statutory requirements regarding Commonwealth citizens have, by GECOM’s own admission, been wrongly applied, with the result that ineligible persons voted in the elections.
The WIN party, which had previously donated tens of millions of dollars to Ali’s PPP/C, encountered hindrances to their participation in the 2025 elections, once it became clear that it posed the greatest threat to the PPP/C.
These are not markers of efficiency or credibility. They mark institutional drift, weak compliance with the law, and a tolerance for practices that heighten cost and undermine democracy. Public confidence is earned not through political declarations but through transparency, accountability, and the consistent application of the law.
The EU Mission’s report offers no endorsement of credibility, let alone free and fair. Its silence speaks louder than any political rhetoric or reassurance.
Yours faithfully,
Christopher Ram