BUT it is a service that banks did not render to the government. All others, who did business with banks, could know if they wanted; only the government was left completely in the dark. And the strange thing was that the government liked it that way. There are animals like that; moles, for instance.
“The biggest single factor that prevents the [Bureau of Internal Revenue, or BIR] and [the Bureau of Customs] from efficiently collecting internal-revenue taxes and duties is their utter lack of a basic management information system that will give the actual total amounts they collect as soon as possible, broken down by taxpayer and kind of tax or duty paid,” Rep. Enrique “Tet” Garcia Jr. of the Second District of Bataan province said. Everyone else had that kind of information, but not the government. By now, I would be impugning the chastity of the mother of the secretary of finance and the wife of the governor of the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas.
But not Garcia. He kept his cool. He pointed out the problem—indeed, the scam—and also the solution. He accused no one in particular, so everyone could prove his or her innocence by cooperating with him. Or show they’re guilty or not.
He proposed: Why not make all payments to the government, made out to the National Treasury, instead of the agencies concerned, say, the BIR or Customs, or even the Department of Trade and Industry?
The payments should not be with just any kind of check, like those to pay your tailor, but special ones that indicate their exclusive use in government transactions and require enhanced authentication procedures to make sure the taxpayer is who he or she says he or she is, the amount is what he or she owes, and that his or her account has enough money to cover the amount of the check.
So the check will not be presented for clearance, along with a mountain of other checks for personal and commercial obligations, and then vanish into thin air, Garcia suggested that the checks be marked by three distinguishing digits as checks intended for the government.
The checks would be directly credited to the head office of the bank and not to the bank branch diverting it. The amount would be credited immediately to the government— which is to say as cash in government hands and not as sums owed by the banks to the government. Now the government could really say what it has at any point in time and who hasn’t paid yet.
All this data would be fed into the kind of information system every bank and business has, but which the government studiously avoided adopting. You would wonder why. A more detailed explanation is in Garcia’s forthcoming book.
For this column, suffice it to say that his proposal was first ignored by the government; and then viciously attacked by the government as the confession of one of the swindlers, which is to say Garcia. Now, why would a swindler complain to the swindled that he is swindling them? No less than the Monetary Board opposed Garcia’s reforms using this argument.
The government said this would be unfair to the banks, which make money out of floating the amounts that taxpayers pay as their fee for handling the transaction.
They had other arguments, as well, to stop the adoption of Garcia’s safeguards, so as to stop the stealing that was patently taking place under the noses of government-finance officials, if not through their hands.
And, yet, those safeguards were not some novelty Garcia invented; the procedures making diversion harder and theft a thing of the past was standard operating procedure for banks when handling payments to the Manila Electric Co., Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co., Globe Telecom, Smart Communications and other public utilities.
Why was the government preventing itself from being robbed? At this point, I would have paid someone to take out the finance officials concerned. But why go to jail? More likely, I would have walked away from it all.
Instead, Garcia repeatedly addressed his concerns and proposed his solutions to the Monetary Board. Suffice it to say we are not being robbed in that way again.
See, this is the difference between someone who hates corruption, like myself, and some who does something about it, and never stops trying until he gets it done. He doesn’t alienate those who oppose him, even if, in fact, he suspects they are involved in the theft. But he enlists their aid only because they have the authority to do something about it. If they won’t help him, it only shows they are guilty.
Both Garcia and I have been House representatives; he still is. But, I think, he has done a whole lot more than outraged people like me, not to mention those who are part of the shenanigans in Congress and the Executive Branch.
Garcia is a traditional politician; I am not. Now, which would you prefer: Me fulminating against wrongdoing, or he quietly putting a stop to it? That’s all for now.
Image credits: Jimbo Albano