‘We are going to lock you up and put away the key’
FINANCE Minister Audley Shaw yesterday promised “a massive clean-up operation” at revenue departments, days after uncovering a major waiver fraud that milked the public purse of millions of dollars.
“I am very sorry to have to announce this today (that) we have had to write to our departments; we know that they are largely honest people, it’s just a few bad apples have made us reach the point where we have had to call in the police,” Shaw said in his opening contribution to the 2010/11 Budget Debate at Gordon House in Kingston.
“But I am promising every public sector worker that is involved in any kind of activity to defraud the Government, we are going to track you down and we are going to lock you up and put away the key,” Shaw said.
“At too many of our revenue departments there is collusive activity between officials in Government and their co-conspirators in the private sector. It is leading to billions of dollars (in lost revenues), not hundreds of millions; we are talking billions of abuse in this country,” he said.
The finance ministry on Wednesday announced that it had suspended the award of waivers at the Taxation Policy Division because of the discovery of “the illicit award of waivers that have been taking place over many years”.
Yesterday, Shaw said the authorities have had to seize records dating back to 2004.
“Already I can tell you that in those records that have been seized 12 months of waiver files are missing,” he said. “We have to now institute new measures because it has become something that is so well-practised that it took one or two incidents, and my own delegation of the Revenue Protection Division to investigate what has now unearthed a major fraud against the Government and people of Jamaica.”
The fraud, he added, has run into hundreds of millions, “if not billions of dollars, over many years through the Customs Department in collusion with departments at my ministry”.
He added: “The culture of tax evasion is a serious problem in Jamaica and it has reached a point where it has infiltrated into too many of the revenue-enhancing institutions of the country. I am sending a signal to the country that we are not increasing taxes this year, but I am going to leave no stone unturned to make sure we broaden the tax net.”
