The Devil's Excrement

This post is partially borrowed from Noticiero Digital (Thanks MB!).

The tax office SENIAT has been doing a good job of improving tax collection in Venezuela. It has, for example, created the category of “special taxpayer” who have to declare in person via special tellers and their accounts can be monitored. It has also carried out a campaign for pressuring people from a moral perspective and it has trained its personnel to improve.

But I disagree with many of the tactics. In the case of the VAT, for example, most merchants pay the tax, but are still shutdown (which I think is stupid) for “formal” reasons. For example, if your receipts are not stamped “cash”, that is a violation of the formal requirements and even if have paid your taxes, your store or company can be shutdown for three days and you have to pay a fine. On top of that, this fine is so vague, and left to the tax inspector that I know firsthand companies whose fine has been equal to the earnings of the company for the full year, even if it had paid all its taxes properly!

Additionally, I have always wondered why it is that since corruption is such a huge problem, why they don’t make all civil servants above a certain level be declared “special taxpayers” also as a way of detecting funny business in their personal accounts.

But I was simply outraged, given the supposed moral high ground that the tax superintendent displays every time he speaks, asking people to denounce others, not to be accomplices and the like, but then we learn via the social security system that the tax office itself failed to pay social security taxes for its workers on nine of the twelve months of last years.

The picture below is the image of the social security system, showing how SENIAT owes, some Bs. 15 billion in those taxes. Even worse, you can not even argue a shortage of funds as these taxes are actually deducted from each employee of SENIAT.

This is another cynical double standard of the robolution, always saying something and then they are caught doing the same thing they preach others should not do. Sadly, while SENIAT is collecting lots of money, the social security system is, and has been bankrupt for years, due to the negligence of its managers (past and present), as well as the fact that many companies and institutions don’t pay their contributions. In fact, to import using CADIVI dollars, you need a certification, among many other requirements, proving you paid your social security taxes.

I guess SENIAT can bypass that, after all they are part of the cynical Government.

This entry was posted on February 7, 2007 at 8:12 pm and is filed under Venezuela.