…GRA knocks AG report on non-compliant self-employed taxpayers
…says TRIPS system flawed, cannot be relied on

THE Guyana Revenue Authority (GRA) said that the 2017 Auditor General Report neglected to state the number of pensioners, housewives, deceased persons, persons who would have migrated and those who are classified as self-employed, as it sought to clarify a recent newspaper article.

In a statement, the GRA made reference to a recent publication by Stabroek News on the 2017 Auditor General’s report headlined “Over 80% active self-employed didn’t submit income tax returns”. The GRA said it would not sit idly by and allow such a high degree of non-compliance by this segment of the taxpaying population. The 2017 AG report states that there were 105,522 active registered self-employed persons in the Total Revenue Integrated Processing System (TRIPS) database of which only 18,351 persons or 17% of the active registrants filed returns, resulting in a total of 87,171 persons or 83% of the active registrants not filing their tax returns. Similarly, in 2016, 73,989 or 80% of the active registrants did not file their returns.

However, the GRA said what the report neglected to state was that the said listing included, but was not limited to, pensioners, housewives, deceased persons, persons who would have migrated, persons granted a Taxpayer Identification Number (TIN) to transact business with the central and commercial banks as well as those transacting business with the GRA, “thereby erroneously misleading the general public as regards the percentage of self-employed taxpayers filing income tax returns.”

According to the GRA, this was expounded on at length by the Commissioner General, Godfrey Statia, when giving evidence and providing explanations before the last Public Accounts Committee. Statia, the GRA said, had explained that this list included several categories of persons who could not be classified as active taxpayers. The Commissioner General also made it clear that the TRIPS system is flawed and does not provide an accurate representation of the active self-employed taxpayers and, as a consequence, statements based solely on information extracted from it would be erroneous and misleading.

The GRA has also issued several press releases on this issue and explained that preliminary data cleansing activity has uncovered various categories of taxpayers to be removed, and work is currently ongoing in this area. According to the last review, out of the total of 618,105 registered taxpayers on TRIPS, 350,967 were found to be dormant and/or invalid, with these presently being removed from the database, leaving the remaining active taxpayers at 267,138. This figure includes all taxpayers, not just the self-employed taxpayers, and is currently being subjected to further cleansing to remove duplicate persons, etc.

Despite the shortcomings of the TRIPS System as mentioned above, the GRA is working assiduously to correct these shortcomings while adopting a risk management approach to prioritise the high-risk taxpayers with greater revenue implications. Consequently, the statement that “billions of taxes not being collected” with regards to self-employed persons is not only downright questionable, since the majority of the so called 80% are not in receipt of taxable income, but also misleading.