A betrayal of our posterity by criminally
Friday, January 18, 2019
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.
We duly congratulate them to have ousted the long ruling Botswana Democratic Party (BDP) from power. Prior to taking power from the BDP, the coalition had made several election promises that are credited for influencing change and swaying the people to vote in its favour.The party had made an undertaking, which its leader and President Duma Boko consistently bellowed in his campaign trail. These undertakings were promises that Batswana would be...