Tag: Budget

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The spending on education

Introduction
The Budget debate is over and the spending is now in full flow. Contracts are being hastily awarded and colourable initiatives taken with significant budgetary implications. The President’s misnamed One Laptop per Family has begun, and despite the seriousness of the questions and the strength and logic of the criticisms, the project is proceeding as the President wants. All, it seems, oblivious to the sad state of education in the country, the many plans accumulating dust on the shelves, and the increasing disparity of performance of the poor child forced to attend the public schools and those of the powerful and privileged attending the private schools.

Just before sitting down to write – or rather type – this column I was reading the judgment delivered in fluent and beautiful language by former Chancellor Keith Massiah in the case Attorney General v Mohammed Ally delivered in 1987 in the Guyana Court of Appeal. On the question of the justiciability of the then Article 11 which has been adapted into Article 13 of the current constitution as well as enshrined in the fundamental rights article (149c), the Chancellor said: “[The question] is therefore in Guyana at large for debate and decision. Now that it has arisen, the court cannot retreat into a state of intellectual agoraphobia, refusing to venture forth and to express an opinion one way or another.” Responding to the question the Chancellor said: “I see no reason to think that the articles in Chapter II of the Constitution have no juridical relevance and are merely idealistic references with cosmetic value only. So to think would be to seek to debase the Constitution.” Unfortunately those concerned with the formulation and promulgation of our national budget have their own contrary ideas of what consultation means. By way of footnote the current Attorney General was a member of the team whose argument found favour with the Court of Appeal.

Process, not an event
This column sees financial management as a continuous process rather than an event and supports the call by Professor Clive Thomas for an independent Budget Office. With so much milk in the public purse, some competent, independent body needs to exercise greater oversight over the proliferating and omnipresent cats. There seems a view – not entirely without merit – that the absence of accountability stops with the President. In fact we only have to look across the ministries and the regions to find ministers, regional representatives and other politicos who emulate the President when it comes to careless and improper spending and accounting. In other words, such behaviour does not stop with the President but in fact starts with him. The nation therefore has to be on its guard and the fourth estate ever alert to the opportunities for improper use of the public purse.

Starting today Business Page will address with greater attention some of the spending approvals by some of the ministries and departments and intends to ask whether the National Assembly fully understands what is taking place with the finances of the country. I wonder if there is one per cent of the population which knows who the Accountant General or who the finance officer in the Office of the President is. One clue: it is not the President, despite how often and how flamboyantly he speaks and acts as if he controls the public purse or carries it in his back pocket.

‘Mis-maths’
I have chosen for the first of these ministry reviews the Ministry of Education partly because of the topicality and controversy over the One Laptop Per Family project on which more than $5.4 billion will be spent. There is some uncertainty and confusion over the total cost of the programme. The junior Minister of Finance Jennifer Webster announced the cost as US$295 per computer or whatever it is, while for 2010 the total expenditure is projected at $3.6 billion, of which half is from the national budget and the other half is expected from the Chinese. If we take the number of 90,000 households, times a unit cost of US$295 and convert that at G$204 to US$1, the figure is $5.416 billion, some 50% more. I would start then by pointing out that this project is more than half of the budget for the Ministry of Education which is $10.3 billion of which the recurrent budget is $7.544 billion and the capital budget is $2.661 billion. We should bear in mind however that the regions also have budgetary allocations for education, additional to those of the ministry.

A summary of the ministry’s budget follows:

Under-funding at UG
The Berbice Campus of the university, with approximately 550 students, receives $132.6 million or approximately $241,091 per student. By contrast the Turkeyen Campus with approximately 5,500 students receives $575.2 million or $104,581 per student, a significant disparity perhaps explained by the level of fixed cost. Similarly, the capital budget for the Turkeyen Campus is $35 million while that for Berbice is $20 million.

The treatment of the university by the government might come as a shock to Vice-Chancellor Professor Carrington and his team who invested considerable resources in preparing a 2009-2012 Strategic Plan that identified under-financing as the major problem facing the university. The numbers show that the President will be spending on his Laptop programme more than seven times the 2011 expenditure on the University of Guyana.

At a meeting with the private sector last year Prof Carrington reported on an encouraging meeting that his team had had with the President and the Cabinet. He is learning faster than he might have wished about the official policy towards education in Guyana and towards higher education in particular. If it is any consolation to the university, public education as a percentage of the national budget has actually declined from 10.6% in 2007 to 9.4% in 2010.

Information versus education
In its wider Strategic Plan 2008-2013 the Ministry of Education emphasised the critical role which the University of Guyana must play in ensuring quality education throughout the education system. The Laptop programme was not even conceived when that plan was developed and agreed by Cabinet. With such ‘ad hoc-ism’ in planning, it can be no surprise that the 2003-2007 Strategic Plan failed to meet the target of “50% for students meeting the defined standards of literacy and numeracy.”

On teacher training, compare Cyril Potter which gets $87.5 million in 2011 while GINA gets $111.5 million, suggesting that for this government imparting controlled information is more deserving of public funding than teacher training. Or NCN, ostensibly a commercial entity, gets $70 million.

Interestingly enough, employment costs account for 30% of the ministry’s budget for education delivery, while in Region 4 it is 73%, in Region 5 it is 72%, and in Region 6 it is 70%. The 30% in the ministry is partly because the subventions for UG come out of its budget. An interesting comparison too would be the distribution of persons engaged in education delivery across the country. There is a wide disparity across the regions between the ratio of persons engaged in education delivery with Region 6 having the largest number in relation to population of the regions and Region 4 the lowest. Whether this has anything to do with the Ministry of Education being responsible for some schools in Region 4 is not obvious, but it is clear that this would not be true of all the schools.

No contracts
In what is described as the Main Office, eight out of the ten employees are contract employees; under the National Education Policy 21 out of 42, up from 9 out of 28 in 2010; in Ministry Administration 56 out of 194; and Education Delivery 25 out of 2,220 employees. This suggests that the pattern of contract employees does not apply to the teachers, who are among the lowest paid public employees with pay scales range from $38,554 per month to $189,006 for what is called a special scale. Again we only have to compare what happens with the so-called consultants and politicians and other connected persons, who have been placed in the Office of the President at taxpayers’ expense.

One intriguing piece of information is the item ‘Dietary’ under Ministry Administration which is $600 million, a whopping 50% increase in 2010 accounting for 40.2% of that unit’s budget for 2011. This programme appears to have escaped the attention of the Auditor General in recent years. On the other hand it might support the notion that we do in fact have 90,000 poor households in Guyana and they are in receipt of some school feeding or similar programme.

Conclusion
The state of our education system is understandable from the poor, uncoordinated or non-existent policies towards education, the failure to identify and address the problems and the misdirection of budgetary allocation by the government. More than forty years after its birth, UG is treated like an unwanted stepchild, with inadequate support and an uncertain future. Sitting at the apex of our education system, in many ways, UG epitomizes the country’s education woes which it will take more than one laptop to solve.

Next week we will look at another of the ministries.

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There is a gap of between 15,000 and 19,000 who are paid the Old Age Pension but are not entitled under the law

Minister of Human Services Ms Priya Manickchand behaved with apoplectic rage in response to a conclusion in a report by her parliamentary colleague Mrs Sheila Holder that the number of persons to whom the Old Age Pension (OAP) is paid is inflated by 17,640 (phantom persons, according to Mrs Holder) with a loss to the state of over $1.3 billion.

Ms Manickchand reacted badly too to a cartoon in the Stabroek News of January 27 depicting her unflatteringly, prompting a letter by her which appeared with another by Mr Ivelaw Henry, her Chief Statistical Officer, both on the same day in the Stabroek News (Saturday, Jan 29) challenging Mrs Holder’s numbers. They both cited in support of the numbers being challenged projections done in November 2006 by a Mr Sonkarley T Beaie, who is described as a UN demographics expert and the holder of an MPhil, perhaps with a view to impress us.

To understand the conflicting positions, it is convenient to address three separate but related issues – statistics, the legal framework for the payment of OAP, and the arrangements in place for the payment of Old Age Pensions.

The most recent census done in 2002 shows the following data in relation to persons 65 years and over:

Between censuses, the country’s mid-year population is tracked by the Bureau of Statistics from data on births, deaths and migration, and is reported on in an appendix to the annual Budget Speech by the Minister of Finance. This is what the Bureau of Statistics reports for the years following the 2002 census: 2003 – 752,500; 2004 – 755,100; 2005 – 757,600; 2006 – 760,200; 2007 – 763,200; 2008 – 766,200, 2009 – 769,600, 2010 – 777,900.

One must always be cautious about population data and even more careful about making assumptions from them. I therefore wonder why instead of taking the actual population figure Mr Henry and his Minister chose to rely on Mr Beaie’s increasingly incorrect projections which for total population in 2010 were “wrong” by 10,000. It is fair to say that any major change in the characteristics of a population – other than through migration, a plague or a baby boom – takes place very slowly. From 1980 to 1991 the shift in the over 65 age group was a 0.16 percentage point and from 1991 to 2002 it was a 0.12 percentage point as shown in the table above. Even if we generously assume that the percentage of that group as a percentage of the current population has climbed to 4.5%, the maximum number of persons eligible for OAP would be approximately 35,000, or 7,000 less than the “around 42,000” the Minister of Finance referred to on more than one occasion in his Budget Speech.

That is not the end of the story, since not every person 65 and over is entitled to OAP. The Old Age Pensions Act sets as the conditions for eligibility for OAP that the person must have: (a) attained the age of sixty-five years; (b) been a citizen for ten years; (c) been ordinarily resident in Guyana during the last twenty years; and (d) passed a means test based on income and assets. Therefore any returnee to Guyana before 1991 is not entitled to a pension because of condition (c) and many if not most of the senior citizens living in Courida Park, Queenstown, Pradoville, Oleander Gardens, Republic Park, former senior public servants, professionals including doctors and lawyers, etc, are not entitled under condition (d).

We all have and know of countless others of our friends and relatives and their parents who do not claim Old Age Pensions. These would include persons 65 and over in the population not entitled to on account of their income and/or assets, plus those who are entitled to but do not claim because they do not know they qualify, plus those not entitled because they returned to Guyana less than twenty years ago. Those probably number between 8,000 and 12,000. To get to the number who meet all the tests, we need to deduct these from the maximum, theoretical 35,000, leaving between 23,000 and 27,000 persons who are entitled. This means that there is a gap of between 15,000 and 19,000 who are paid, but who are not entitled to the pension under the law.

At the current rate of $7,500, between $1.4 billion and $1.7 billion is being paid out unlawfully each year.

A recent Value-For-Money audit done by the Audit Office identifies a host of accounting and audit issues that could have given rise to the wide gap.

While the Audit Office must be commended for undertaking the exercise, it is regrettable that it did not attempt to put in dollar terms the range of values involved in its findings, and that it did not look at the related public assistance programme that is subject to even fewer rules and is more politicised and corrupted.

Let us put the calculation into perspective. If Old Age Pensions were paid only to persons legally entitled, then each pensioner could easily receive another $4,000 to $6,000 per month out of the money allocated in the 2011 Budget.

Ms Manickchand should now be willing to make her list publicly available for scrutiny.

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Tax rates hardly matter

Introduction
As promised, this week’s column looks at the importance of tax rates in the overall scheme of tax policy in any country. I start by saying that lower rates of tax do matter – they allow the taxpayer to retain a higher level of the income earned which they can use for re-investment or higher dividend payments to shareholders. They can also make a country more competitive since prospective investors pay some attention to countries’ nominal tax rates in their investment equation. Hence, the decision to reduce the corporate tax rates by five percentage points would be welcomed both by companies and individuals, as evidenced by the swift response of the Private Sector Commission (PSC) to the announcement by the Minister of Finance.

In making his announcement the Minister said companies benefiting from this measure would be in a position to retain and invest a significantly higher share of their profits. While some may suggest that the reduction in the tax rate had an unmistakable eye on the upcoming general elections, they cannot argue with the effect advanced by the Minister since by definition a reduced tax charge leaves more after-tax profits which are available for investments, higher dividend payments and related party loans. But seemingly too quick to please the political directorate, it was the private sector representatives who stated that the reduction would make Guyana competitive in terms of tax rates.

The private sector leaders travel around and must know that the corporate rate in two of our major Caricom trading partners (Trinidad and Tobago and Barbados) is 25% while our reduced rates are 30% for non-commercial companies, 40% for commercial companies and 45% for telephone companies. Non-regional investors on the other hand would be familiar with much lower tax rates in their own countries, so that our 30%/40% would still sound to them extremely high.

Government failure
The biggest but unacknowledged problem for the private sector is the failure by this government to address tax policy and tax reform which it has been promising for eighteen years. For example, tax policy would address how we treat one sector over another, whether a single person should receive the same personal allowance as the single parent with a number of children, whether there should be differentials in tax rates, the balance between direct and indirect taxes, extending the use of the withholding tax to domestic contractors, etc. Unfortunately what passes for tax policy is the demand for tax revenues to finance a bloated, politicised and inefficient bureaucracy and a government that seems to have an insatiable appetite to spend, spend and spend.

I strongly believe that the flat, across-the-board reduction of five percentage points is both intellectually lazy and politically cowardly. If the officials of the Ministry of Finance were to read the report of the Bank of Guyana (latest mid-year 2010) or indeed the statistics in their own National Estimates, they would see that the business community is increasingly investment-averse despite all the tax and contracts goodies thrown their way. As the following table shows, growth in the economy is being driven by the public sector.

[table to be inserted]

Source: National Estimates 2011

Goodies
The tax laws are now replete with all forms of incentives, some of which are general and others specific, some found in legislation and others in agreements signed by the political arm of the government. Some are intended to encourage exports (the export allowance), investments (the Income Tax in Aid of Industry) which also provides tax holidays for investments in the hinterland, low cost housing and exemption from VAT.

More than a decade after its introduction and generous exemptions for public companies investments, the Stock Exchange remains extremely inactive with no new issuers, i.e., companies going public, or existing companies offering new issues. In the absence of rules on thin capitalisation and the differential tax treatment of loans versus dividends, even our larger public companies find it cheaper to borrow than to raise new capital. There was a time when Banks DIH and DDL could be relied upon to make rights issue or bonus shares which allowed for some greater liquidity in the market. They have not needed to do so.

The commercial banks hold deposits of more than $230 billion dollars of which loans and advances, inclusive of the public sector loans, amounted to $68.9 billion. For several years the government has been critical of the commercial banks and Minister Manzoor Nadir, the self-appointed chief spokesperson of the 2011 Budget is on record as stating that “the commercial banks have been penalizing our people for too long.” He is also on record for cautioning against differential tax rates to protect the locally manufactured products since they “protect local inefficiencies.” That Mr Nadir now supports the things he had earlier railed against shows how politicised the tax system is, how it is influenced by the changing tides of political opportunitism and why we have a tax system that is, by any measure other than revenue collection, so dysfunctional.

Drivers
Tax policy has to be driven by a vision and relevant information. This column has called for more relevant information to be disclosed in public documents. Principal among these would be the annual report of the Guyana Revenue Authority which the Minister of Finance has failed to table in the National Assembly for some time now. Let us see how much the construction sector, the bauxite sector, the forestry sector, the agriculture sector including rice, sugar and other crops sectors contribute to the national coffers, and how much remissions, rebates and holidays they receive which may amount to billions each year. And yes, we should be able to see how much each region contributes and compare this with their receipts from the central government.

The Minister has access to data that would tell him that the bulk of the corporate taxes collected by the GRA is paid literally by a handful of companies. These are the commercial banks, Banks DIH and DDL, GT&T and Digicel and the oil distribution companies. The majority of companies could not care about tax rate – they decide how much tax they will pay and have their accounts prepared accordingly. This of course is also true of the self-employed, for which Regent Street is a metonym and to which political protest is as applicable as tax evasion is. There is a strong suspicion that setting a payment level for any period is also true of VAT, and as I have written before in this column, that some politicians have given pledges to the business community for tax support in exchange for votes.

Conclusion
Tax policy and tax reform will clearly have to wait for some years. The Jagdeo-Singh duo is comfortable with the status quo under which urban workers and consumers are the biggest contributors. They are equally comfortable with some sectors and segments making no contribution to the national coffers while demanding so much. The parliamentary debate on the 2011 Budget will close without any discussion on either tax policy or tax reform. In that sense, we are all losers.

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Mr Nadir here are some of the state entities with poor audit records

Mr. Manzoor Nadir’s letter on the 2011 budget (Stabroek News, January 23, 2011: Dr. Ashni Singh’s credentials are impeccable) was the kind of “honesty” that Guyanese have come to expect from this itinerant political leader. Mr. Nadir accuses me of being envious of Dr. Ashni Singh’s brilliance and credentials; invites me to join the leadership of the PNC/R and then goes on to praise the 2011 Budget. The second is the most convenient to dispatch first: Mr. Nadir must know that I declined an invitation to be nominated for the presidential candidacy of the PNCR and I also refused his invitation to go on the TUF slate for every election since 1997. I now address the other issues.

I last had a cordial discussion with Mr. Nadir this Tuesday, January 19, the day after the 2011 Budget. He acknowledged my correction of a misleading claim he made last year on the performance of the economy and that he had begun to repeat this year. He also indicated that he relies on the Ministry of Finance for some of his numbers. This gentleman is the leader of the country’s only declared anti-communist party who gave himself completely to the country’s only declared Marxist party, one that has distinguished itself by the single word corruption! Maybe he is honestly trying to correct the historical wrong of his party’s joining with the PNC to cause the PPP to lose office.

His accuracy or honesty, or both, come again into question in trying to attribute to me personally an official publication of Ram & McRae, of which I am one of three partners. The analysis did not question Dr. Ashni Singh’s credentials and I would have hoped that Mr. Nadir would recognise the analysis – done by a team of the firm’s dedicated and professional staff working through Budget night – was about the Budget and not about either Dr. Singh or me. In fact I now say that Dr. Singh’s credentials stand in marked contrast to the increasingly intellectual bankruptcy of his and the PPP/C’s annual budgets.

I would avoid Mr. Nadir’s personal attacks and forays into my mind and motives and address only the essential points in issue. As the Ram & McRae analysis pointed out, and which Mr. Nadir could not dispute, the personal allowance of $40,000 now is in real terms less than the value of the $35,000 when it was set at that level three years ago. Nor can he dispute that the Minister did not indicate the cost of the tax proposals in the budget speech, a cost that just might show that businesses are expected to receive more from the 2011 Budget than the workers, pensioners and indigents.

On the issue of contract employees, Mr. Nadir correctly quoted from the firm’s analysis but then goes off into an excursion into diversion by explaining that “in 2010 we (government) moved all the cleaners, handypersons, drivers and lower level skills to contracted positions.” Mr. Nadir, like his political boss, must think this is a country of fools to believe that “cleaners, handypersons, drivers and lower level skills” can account for a 40% increase in that group. For the record I draw his attention to Table 9 of Volume 1 of the National Estimates, account code # 6115 Semi-Skilled Operatives and Unskilled, which shows an increased, not a reduced allocation, even after the low level “move”. The same applies to Temporary Employees and Clerical and Office Support!

Mr. Nadir must also know that his group of lower level skills is commingled with political appointees such as Reepu Daman Persaud, Feroze Mohammed, Harry Persaud Nokta, Shyam Nokta, Odinga Lumumba, Dr. Randy Persaud, Dr. Prem Persaud, Gail Teixeira and Kwame McKoy and hundreds of others at the Office of the President, the Ministry of Finance and indeed throughout the public service. Mr. Nadir should tell us which one of these contract persons earns less than $500,000 per month, not argue over the minimum wage about which “his” government has a questionable record. And he might wish to tell us whether the decision to treat the lower level persons as part of the group of contractors was done to disguise the average pay of this group after I had exposed it two years ago.

Stating that I used a broadside to describe the state of audits of public entities, he dared me to name any of those entities. Does he need any more than NICIL, the entity of which the Finance Minister is Chairman and through which state assets are diverted for unlawful purposes, and which disdainfully refuses to have an audit or to file an annual return? Just in case he needs more, here we go: Go-Invest, Guyana Energy Agency, Institute of Applied Science and Technology, Integrity Commission, GINA. Need some more? What about National Sports Commission, Guyana National Bureau of Standards, Environmental Protection Agency, etc.

Only someone who has not read the Public Corporations Act or the Guyana Revenue Authority Act would make such an uninformed and incorrect statement that it is the Auditor General who is responsible to report to Parliament on entities falling under those Acts. In fact, the Acts require the entities to submit, within six months of the end of the year, their audited financial statements and directors’ report to the Minister of Finance or other relevant Minister. It is the Minister who has responsibility for tabling them in the National Assembly. It gives me no pleasure to correct Mr. Nadir twice in one week.

Mr. Nadir does not help his Minister by his reference to the Audit Office, which provides evidence of a relationship between the Minister and that Office which constitutes a uniquely bad case of professional independence. Or by his questions about statistics which we know emanate from the Stats Bureau and the Bank of Guyana over which the Minister of Finance exerts both official and improper influence.

Two points in closing: one, it is the sycophancy of people like Minister Nadir that encourages the excesses, improprieties and illegalities of the Jagdeo Administration; and two, I hereby publicly invite Mr. Nadir and the Finance Minister to appear on Plain Talk to discuss the 2011 Budget. If Dr. Singh is unwilling, I invite Mr. Nadir to bring along one of his TUF colleagues. That is, if he can find one.

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Putting the encomiums into some perspective – 2011 Budget

Introduction
Before going into a couple of matters arising out of the 2011 Budget let us clear up a few points. In prefatory remarks during his budget speech, the Minister of Finance said “today, the Guyanese economy is larger than ever before with gross domestic product (GDP) now measured at $453 billion, and more resilient than ever before…” He did not say that this number increased dramatically last year by the simple exercise of rebasing the national accounts. As Ram & McRae pointed out in their response to the 2010 Budget, the re-basing caused an immediate increase in the GDP by 63%. Magically, that also made each of us much better off, in national economic terms, than we were before the rebasing.

What the Minister avoided as well was any reference to, or mention of, the extent to which the economy is driven by the underground, illegal and criminal economies. It is correct to say that the proceeds of these activities are not reported to the tax authorities and therefore escape taxation. But it is not correct to say that they do not form part of the GDP figure. The reason why they do get counted is because of the two ways used to measure GDP – by the income method under which such transactions are by definition excluded, and under the expenditure method under which it is captured.

Here is a simple example: drug man A ‘earns’ say one million US dollars during the year as his commission for moving the goods from Colombia to the US via Guyana. Clearly he will not report this to the tax authorities and is careful how and how much he washes through the cambio and street foreign exchange markets. But when he uses that money to set up a business, buy a vehicle or establish a housing scheme, the transaction enters into the GDP figures. So it does contribute to the ‘growth’ in the economy and to its ‘resilience.’

International reserves
Dr Singh also drew attention to the country’s external reserves but failed to mention the part played by Petro-Caribe and IMF funds in this equation. Nor was he prepared to relate the reserves to the country’s import bill which is spiralling almost out of control. As the few live off the fat of the poor, the country is now spending increasing amounts on luxury goods which cause our import bill to climb. In 2010, merchandise imports are projected to grow by 20% to US$1,477 million with the result that for 2011, the overall balance of payments (the account that measures international trade) is projected at a surplus of US$24.4M compared with US$90.1M in 2010 and US$234 million in 2009.

That places the country’s international reserves and its exchange rate at risk which, but for remittances, would have been significant if not disastrous. A sound tax system would see that the economy does not bear a disproportionate share of this burden. As we saw in Suriname a couple of days ago, the government seeks to address these goods by what are called “sin taxes.” Our sin tax for a very different reason is the VAT.

Over-exuberance
While the Finance Minister engaged in spinning the numbers, Mr Manzoor Nadir, a sometimes over-enthusiastic TUF member of the government takes it further by actually making false claims about the country’s economic performance. During this past week in a very cordial telephone conversation with him, I had to remind him of his wrong claim last year that four successive years of growth is a joint record in Guyana. I noted that he is now magnifying the myth on his current television rounds by extrapolating from his 2010 mis-claim that with Dr Singh’s reported 2010 growth, the five years continuous growth “represents the longest period of sustained growth in Guyana.” That is not correct and it was unfortunate that none of his fellow panelists or interviewers seemed to have been better informed or willing to correct him. As I pointed out to Mr Nadir, the period 1991-1997 saw seven years of significant growth that started to fall once Mr Jagdeo had taken over from Asgar Ally as Finance Minister in the mid-nineties.

Tax rates and allowances
The reduction in the tax rates for the corporate sector – with the discriminatory exception of the two telephone companies – has brought the Private Sector Commission alive, giving them something to crow about. The Georgetown Chamber of Commerce, a leading member of the PSC, was more measured in its response – it saw the increase in the threshold and the reduction in the tax rate as a good start. Neither of them bothered to reflect that the increase in the threshold does not restore the allowance to the value it had three years ago. In other words, adjusted for inflation, the $40,000 announced for 2011 is less that the $35,000 it replaced.

To have meant something the threshold should be the $50,000 called for by the unions. However, because this group pays such a significant portion of the taxes on income collected by the state, the government can be neither bold nor honest in addressing the level of the threshold. A proper tax threshold should be an indexed number that allows automatic increase in line with inflation. Under the un-indexed system, the individual is forced to bear the cost of inflation. It is for the same reason that the government will not reduce the rate of VAT – it is a cash cow and brings in huge revenues so that a couple of percentage points reduction would mean a lot.

The private sector has bought into a strategy that compresses the threshold for several years, releasing it only in an election year. It has too, bought into the myth of the relevance of the corporate tax rate. For the waged employee the personal income tax rate is meaningful since barring a small travel allowance here and a meal allowance there, after the personal allowance, his entire income is taxed.

What do tax rates mean?
With very few exceptions, for the self-employed and the corporate sector, tax rates mean little. They decide how much tax they are prepared to pay and have their friendly accountant – and here I include some professionally qualified accountants – do the rest. It embarrasses me that a profession to which I belong engages in this or any level of tax evasion. What is worse is that all of this is known to the authorities who seem unwilling to do anything about it.

Next week I hope to have comprehensive data establishing that for the self-employed and for segments of the corporate sector, tax rates matter little. Many of them live off the taxes paid by employed persons and the consumers. The estimates for 2011 show projected income from income tax under the PAYE as $16 billion and VAT and Excise Taxes of $50 billion, together accounting for roughly two-thirds of the total taxes to be collected by the GRA this year.

And this is one of the reasons why I do not think this government wants to undertake any tax reform. For them the threshold and the tax rate offer an easy, low cost option. It also throws the private sector off their call for tax reform that looks at all issues of taxation, including sectoral and geographical contribution. The private sector has failed to ask even the most basic question and the reasons for the delayed tabling of the annual report of the GRA by the Minister of Finance. None of them seems impressed that the basic rate of personal tax is now higher than the corporate tax rate, a situation unprecedented in this country. And this has happened while dividend income is tax free, as are capital gains on shares in public companies.

The expenditure side of the budget
The private sector too does not appear concerned about the expenditure side of the budget. Expenditure keeps defying the laws of gravity, increasing over the period 2006 to 2011 (projected) by 60%. Over the same period the capital budget is projected to increase by 48%, from $42 billion (2006) to $62 billion. Employment costs over the period will have risen from $14 billion to $22 billion or 57% but not for the traditional public servant whose income has increased by the PPP/C’s standard 5% annually. It has come from that creation called ‘contract employees’ the number of which keeps increasing annually.

In 2010, wages and salaries for contract employees increased by a whopping 40% while the total wage bill increased by 0.24%! Not only are funds being diverted though NICIL but employees are also being diverted, this time via the Office of the President, the Ministry of Health, etc. Worse, my information is that some of these ‘contractors’ are treated as self-employed and are responsible for paying their own taxes. In other words, the government encourages the tax evasion.

The overall deficit of the government finances is projected to increase from $20.6B to $34.0B. And that is after $14 billion of Norwegian money. If that does not come in, any government that comes in after the 2011 elections will have a real job on their hands.

If only the private sector could be convinced that these matters are as important as the tax rate, we would in fact have a good debate going.