Blowing some hot air?

The heart of the problem is: how could the big earners, both individual and companies, have managed to understate their assessments, or altogether keep out of the collection net, at least in certain areas of their business, year after year, with complete impunity? Their lifestyle studded with multi-featured luxury cars, jeeps, posh apartments, palatial home or office sprawls bore the signature of their super-rich, eminently taxable status, leave aside their splurging abroad with huge unearned incomes stashed away in overseas banks. Why has it been so difficult to identify them and pin them down on hard facts and figures of their accumulated wealth so far?

There can be only one answer to this question: the rich-to-super rich tax evaders have had the proverbial cat's nine lives, thanks to their being in league with an equally surviving set of revenue officials. These people are spawning new generations of both tax dodgers and abettors in tax evasion. They are also discouraging honest businessmen to pay taxes. Concomitantly, what we see is the recurrence of revenue deficits.

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We are fully in favour of a system modelled on the practices of some countries in the neighbourhood where revenue collection is achieved nearly to potential. Book manipulation is more of an exception than rule in their contexts. Indeed, there is no alternative to taking a leaf from their books.

The bottom line is: so long as the government fails to break the nexus of corruption and bribery between potential tax payers and revenue department officials, tax evasion will remain the order of the day. Clearly, the government is in dire need of a strong political will to turn the table on tax-dodging.