Coincidence or deliberate action?
The advertisement placed in the newspapers by the Guyana Revenue Authority cannot escape notice. It is large and it contains reports of a suspected breach of the security of the revenue collection agency. Indeed e-mail emanating from the Commissioner-General Khurshid Sattaur, although not in his capacity as Commissioner-General, detailed a series of proposed actions against Glenn Lall, the publisher of Kaieteur News.
Needless to say, the contents of the e-mail were damaging to Mr Sattaur since they exposed a side of him that was unknown by most. The mail spoke of a planned course of action against Lall, whom Sattaur described as many things, including a vagrant.
A vagrant is someone with no fixed place of abode, so Mr Sattaur knew something about Lall that the rest of the country did not. But even more serious is the planned attack to silence and even jail him for crimes imagined. I say imagined, because nothing in the law supported Mr Sattaur’s pursuit of Mr Lall.
Then there is the call for the police to investigate what Mr Sattaur calls a breach of security. Initially, this caused me some confusion because in one publication, Mr Sattaur was quoted as saying that the e-mail were fakes. For someone to say in one breath that the e-mail were fakes, and in the next to admit that he did send them, is indeed confusion.
A long time ago, the late Forbes Burnham said that once something is put down on paper, that piece of paper is likely to end up anywhere, even in places where it was never intended to go. The late Fr Andrew Morrison made good use of such pieces of paper.
I remember instances of Burnham making travel plans and indicating the kind of beverages he would like on the aircraft. The list immediately made the Catholic Standard, much to Burnham’s annoyance. In one case, at a meeting of the Central Executive of the then ruling Party, Burnham announced that he would catch the Quisling. He has gone to his grave, but he never did.
In the same vein, I have been hearing about security breaches in the United States. One major retail outlet, Target, reported that somehow, a group had got hold of people’s personal information. The company said that the information included people’s credit card numbers, their social security numbers, and other such information.
Just this past week there was a report that another company had found what is considered the largest breach in United States history. The accounts of 75 million people had been accessed and stolen. Fortunately whoever did have not tried to access these people’s bank accounts because as the company noted, there were no unusual levels of spending against these people.
Even scarier has been the case of nude photographs of actresses and other prominent socialites being hacked and released to the public. These were posted on iCloud, the storage warehouse created by Apple for users of Apple products.
These days, there is no failsafe for people using the global communication network. That Sattaur has had his information revealed should come as no surprise. My e-mail has been hacked perhaps more times than I would ever know. I certainly remember the last time, because I was confronted with information that I had sent and received.
This time around, Mr Sattaur is asking the police to investigate and to get Lall to say how he came by the e-mail that have exposed Sattaur. The police may have to do to Lall what the Americans have been accused of doing to the prisoners at Guantanamo and have been roundly criticized for.
And while all this has happened, someone approached the commercial bank I use for information on my account. I know that the government has done such a thing to other people in the past. In our society, people are not likely to oppose officialdom, so when an official makes a request of a commercial bank, the information is quietly released.
In my case, I cannot say with certainty that the information was released, but I wondered at the sudden interest in me. As if that was not enough my daughter, Karen, who is employed at Scotiabank told me Friday night that she got a letter from the Guyana Revenue Authority that she had sent in her income tax returns 23 days late and had incurred a penalty of $14,000.
I would like to believe that she was not the only person who filed late returns and that she was not the only person who got such a letter. I do not have the time to mount an investigation. I know that there is a penalty for late returns and something at the back of my head tells me that it is a small percentage of the tax.
If that is the case, then my daughter is working for an astronomical sum per annum to be paying even more taxes than Guyana Times and many large companies in Guyana. Perhaps it is coincidental that she has been written to at the same time the Guyana Revenue Authority has its fangs bared at Kaieteur News, where I am the Editor-in-Chief.
It remains that the GRA has filed tax evasion charges against Lall, his wife and two family friends, and the summons have not yet been served. In fact, had it not been for the release of the charge in two newspapers aligned to the ruling party, no one would have been any the wiser.
And since by his own admission, Mr Sattaur has said that he released confidential information to a private citizen, he is now liable to criminal prosecution. It would be interesting to see how this plays out.
