Through practices such as money laundering, trade misinvoicing and the abuse of transfer pricing, corporates and individuals in Botswana have perfected the art of sidestepping Botswana Unified Revenue Services (BURS) over the years, assisted by tax advisories both locally and abroad. Money laundering involves concealing the source or purpose of “dirty” money while trade misinvoicing is a practice involving the falsification of import or export values to trick the taxman. Transfer pricing, a term most Batswana are ignorant about, involves transactions between related entities. The violation comes when the value or terms of these transactions is manipulated to lower a tax liability.
While the concepts involved may appear complex and removed from ordinary Batswana, some of these practices have become so commonplace that they are no longer thought of as unethical by perpetrators. Think of the hundreds of millions of Pula annually lost through under-invoicing of grey import vehicles, through a trail of collusion stretching from Japan, to Durban to Mogoditshane.
