When an extracting company like London Mining posts whopping revenues of $ 142.1 million and African Minerals Ltd. generating increasing revenues of $246.9 million, one wonders why Sierra Leone is still hovering around its Le 1.6 trillion annual domestic revenues. Sierra Leone’s revenue collection is too weak and stagnant, less innovative and too many fingerprints of massive corruption in most government institutions. The Auditor General’s report on the past year – December 31st, 2011- on the public account of Sierra Leone with the compliance audits on Ministries, Departments and Agencies, Schools and Vocational Institutions, Local Councils, City, Municipal and District Councils, Public Enterprises, Commissions and Donor Funded Projects remains one of the most valuable and visible piece of documents that displayed the height of financial irresponsibility perpetrated by many government officials. That Audit report was a declaration of war against corruption and mismanagement of public funds. But what happened to that block buster report? It was dead on arrival even before reaching the sacred halls of the Sierra Leone Parliament. Today, it is being archived in the dark distance shelves of Parliament. According to the Auditor General’s Report, the estimated cash losses to the public purse was Le110, 914,263,391 for 2011. As for the following Ministries audited from January 2011 to December 31, 2011, the problems included revenues collected and not paid into bank accounts, revenues not accounted for, expenditures without authentic documents, fuel utilized without operating records, fuel chits issued to illegal vehicles, withdrawal without supporting documents and other reasons related to that Ministry or Department. These are the common practices of those who work to defraud our nation behind the desk of public trust for so many years. And Sierra Leone will not have strong revenue baseline if these endemic corrupt practices are not strategically and comprehensively addressed. Sierra Leone is beginning to see the adversity such unpatriotic behavior brings – like recently losing the MCC and the Millennium Development Goals reselection process and the troubling Transparency International report about Sierra Leone becoming one of the most corrupt countries in Sub Saharan Africa. Issuing empty warning to departments and agencies is the wrong approach to setting standards and dealing with such national dilemmas. Somehow, we must develop accountability standards to improve on the collection and retention of our goods and service taxes, custom and excise duties, increase the fees on our royalties and licenses from the mining sector to 8.5 percent of GDP, increase Road User Fees and Vehicle Licenses to a projected Le 328.9 billion, provide NASSIT social security numbers to every Sierra Leonean and create a more advance approach in collecting income taxes while increasing corporate taxes to about 38 percent. If government can foster the environment for job creation where more direct foreign investments will be enhanced – more people will pay taxes, more companies will pay corporate taxes and revenue numbers will increase dramatically. But these hikes must be simultaneous with job growth, better road networks with adequate public delivery services like 95% electricity access, clean water, computer based skilled education, strong judicial system, sound labor laws, broad band internet access, structural financial institutions that provides access to credit and capital market and other technological capacity.
Posted on: Mon, 21 Jul 2014 03:27:45 +0000