Simple scheme
Just when you think that you have seen every possible way to fool the system something new comes up.
This time it is a restaurateur – one with a name and reputation to hold up as well – who finds himself on the wrong side of the law with a simple scheme that seemed to work flawlessly for years.
By setting up a company in another jurisdiction and subsequently signing a franchise contract with this entity, the restaurateur ducked hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes.
The franchise fees he either paid or just booked in his administration, disappeared into his own pockets and partially used to finance another business.
This was, of course a straightforward case of tax fraud, but one could also file it under the label corruption because the restaurateur involved his brother in the scheme as a figurehead for the entity in a foreign jurisdiction.
This example shows that corruption is not the exclusive playground for greedy politicians. In the private sector, corruption is alive and kicking as well.
Earlier this week we reported about the more than two hundred warrants the tax inspectorate sent to tax payers that do not toe the line. Anyone who takes the trouble to read through these listings in the National Gazette will quickly realize what a motley crew this is.
Restaurants, nail salons, heavy equipment operators, car rentals, real estate businesses and many others are a part of it and most of them have one thing in common: they have no known address in St. Maarten.
This means in a number of cases that the tax payers simply have left the island – they are not here anymore. But if the tax inspectorate were to send another warrant to, say, Energizer, a now defunct construction company that belonged to Member of Parliament Silvio Matser, it would hit an administrative blank wall. Maybe the office of Energizer is still standing on that piece of land in Cay Hill, but the doors are closed and there is nobody home.
Yet, everybody knows where to find its one-time owner, Silvio Matser. We mentioned other examples of well-known citizens with tax arrears that cannot be found by the tax inspectorate, while everybody else knows exactly where those people are.
One could say that the tax inspectorate is unable (or unwilling, but that sounds rather unkind) to connect the dots, while the same exercise is kid’s play for everyone else.
All this makes the drive for linking existing databases a logical step. That this is not happening – or maybe it is and we don’t know about it – puts a big fat question mark behind the government’s administrative efforts.
There has been a lot of talk about straightening such matters out, but based on the warrants that are still published with the ‘no known address’ label one must wonder.
Remember our fool proof formula? I + A = R.
In other words: intention plus action equals result, whereby result is the determining factor because unlike figures, results don’t lie.
If the government announces an intention to do something, all you have to do is wait for the result. If that result is not forthcoming there are only two possibilities: the announced intention was a lie, or the action that should have make the intention a reality is lacking.
Keep your politicians on the straight and narrow with this formula in mind. It never fails.
