Monday 9th December, 2024

The Millers’ Mafia has won another battle, a very decisive one at that. It has been able to coerce the mighty NPP government into increasing the maximum retail prices (MRPs) of all varieties of rice except keeri samba by Rs. 10. By opting for an upward price revision, the government has unwittingly justified the millers’ unlawful practice of selling rice at prices above the MRPs previously. What it has chosen to do is like hurling a chunk of umbalakada (‘Maldives fish’) at a cat that is running away with a piece of fish, as a local saying goes. We hear champagne corks popping in rice mills, especially in Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa.

President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, at a meeting with a group of rice millers in Colombo over the weekend, announced the government’s decision to increase the MRPs for rice. He appeared to be reading the millers the riot act, but in the end the latter had the last laugh—as always.

It has been reported that the rice millers agreed to adhere to the revised MRPs and release adequate rice stocks to the market, but whether they will go on doing so or ask for further price increases, after a while, remains to be seen. President Dissanayake has indicated that noncompliance will be severely dealt with. One can only hope that he will match his words with deeds and ensure that the interests of consumers and farmers are safeguarded.

Taming the powerful rice millers, who have become a law unto themselves, is a stupendous task that not even war-winning President Mahinda Rajapaksa was equal to. He gave in to their pressure and allowed them to do as they pleased. Former frontline combat officer-turned President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, whom his political opponents made out to be an autocrat, also chose to touch his forelock to the Millers’ Mafia.

Successive governments have capitulated to the millers, who have demonstrated their ability to make politicians eat out of their hands. Political leaders go ballistic on election platforms, vowing to take tough action against those who exploit the public, but their roars give way to mews after being ensconced in power. This is why politicians and their parties must be made to reveal whether they have benefited from the slush funds of the millers and other members of the mudalali fraternity given to exploitative practices.

The owner of ‘Araliya Rice’, Dudley Sirisena, who is one of the powerful millers blamed for manipulating the rice and paddy markets and profiteering, in an interview with Hiru TV, on 02 Dec., claimed that the current rice shortage had come about because rice was used for manufacturing beer. Claiming that the beer companies preferred nadu to other varieties of rice, he sought to deflect blame for the current rice shortage. Interestingly, he was among the millers who met President Dissanayake the other day, and agreed to make all varieties of rice, including nadu, available at the revised prices. If the rice shortage has been caused by the beer companies, as Sirisena has claimed, how come the millers have undertaken to release rice to the market? Are they going to turn beer into rice?

However, Sirisena’s tall tale is not without an iota of truth; it is public knowledge that beer companies use rice as a raw material although they cannot be blamed for the current rice shortage, which is mostly due to hoarding by a cartel of unscrupulous millers. The government must take action to ensure that rice is eaten and not ‘drunk’ (in the form of beer).

Curiously, the government has reportedly decided to sell imported nadu rice at the previous MRP (Rs. 220 a kilo). Rice to be imported from India is believed to cost only about Rs. 110 a kilo, and the 100-rupee markup on a kilo of imported rice is nothing but unfair. It is unbecoming of the State Trading Corporation and Sathosa, tasked with importing rice, to make such unconscionable profits.

Worse, some large-scale millers responsible for market manipulations are among the rice importers; they are known to take imported rice all the way to their mills in North Central Province, and release it to the market after rebranding and repackaging it. They will now be able to sell a kilo of imported rice at Rs. 230 and earn a profit of Rs. 120 besides fleecing the public by keeping the prices of locally produced rice artificially high. They will get the best of both worlds!

Many compliant taxpayers have expressed their frustration with the Inland Revenue Department (IRD) for insisting that the Return of Income for the year of assessment 2023/2024 be filed as an electronic return (e-return). It is perplexing why such a requirement is being enforced in a country such as ours where computer skills are woefully lacking. In many other countries the taxpayer is entitled to submit a return either electronically or by hard copy (paper). The choice should be with the taxpayer and not the IRD. In some countries, any tax refunds to individuals are inevitably delayed for those who submit manual returns compared to those who submit e-returns. This incentivises the taxpayer to embrace technology. But here, it is forced down the taxpayer’s throat.

A fundamental principle must be that tax compliance should not result in the taxpayer having to incur additional cost or physical/mental stress in fulfilling their civic obligation of paying their income tax. Many senior citizens are not computer savvy enough to navigate through complex returns or do not have access to a laptop or other paraphernalia needed to upload supporting documents. Therefore, many individual taxpayers who struggle to complete their returns by themselves are now forced to engage the services of a professional tax consultant or accountant to submit their returns. This is an additional cost that taxpayers should not be burdened with. We understand that the IRD reluctantly accepted hard copy (paper) returns from some senior citizen who insisted they could not submit an e-return.

The IRD should concentrate on getting more people liable to pay tax to do so, thus widening the tax net instead of penalizing those who settle their dues but may delay submitting their return for the above mentioned reasons. The Inland Revenue Act provides penalties for failure to file a return on time and for criminal proceedings as well as issuing default assessments where necessary. It has often been said, with good reason, that the IRD bullies people who pay their taxes and submit their returns and does little to tackle blatant evasion which is rampant.

We have been told that taxpayers who receive interest income from fixed deposits are required to enter a significant amount of information into the e-return, which is tedious and unnecessary, particularly if the taxpayer can submit or upload a certificate from the deposit taker confirming the interest received and the advance income tax deducted at source. As in other countries, it is up to the IRD and the deposit taking institutions to devise a compliant digital platform that will enable such information to be uploaded to the IRD’s Random Access Management Information System (RAMIS).

IRD invested hugely in setting up RAMIS but was unable to utilize it effectively over many years. The banks and other deposit, too, have not played their part in this because many banks are not issuing certificates to their customers that disclose all the information required by the IRD. Time was when a blanket 15 percent withholding tax (WHT) was imposed at source on interest and dividend income with no further liability thereafter. This undoubtedly imposed hardship on those not liable for income tax in obtaining notoriously slow refunds from the department and was an advantage to high income earners. Nevertheless, like PAYE (Pay As You Earn) tax, it was an easy collection method for IRD.

After the November deadline for submitting the annual return for 2023/24 passed, the IRD issued a circular extending the deadline for submitting tax returns for that year until December 7. The circular cites the difficulties taxpayers encountered last week due to the inclement weather that prevailed in the country. No mention has been made of the RAMIS system being more or less inaccessible in the days leading to the deadline, as it could not deal with too many taxpayers trying to access the system at the same time! The circular also mentions that IRD officials will offer special support until December 6, 2024, for those who visit the department for technical assistance to submit their return online. This is most welcome.

According to currently available information, about a million taxpayers are registered with the IRD. This seems insufficient, considering that more than eight million are employed, and the income threshold for paying income tax is Rs. 100,000 monthly. It will be interesting to know as to how many of the million have submitted their tax returns by the due date or will do so in the next few days and weeks. Undoubtedly, people need to be tax-compliant, but it is also necessary for the IRD to make the process easy for taxpayers to make payments and submit their annual income tax returns.

The IRD currently does not accept cheques for settling tax obligations. A taxpayer must make a direct bank transfer or settle his/her dues through a banker’s pay order. This imposes an unfair added cost on tax payers as well as the inconvenience of having to visit the bank for this purpose. This requirement clearly is intended to ensure that tax cheques do not bounce. But the department is empowered to impose penalties on those whose cheques are dishonoured. Why impose additional burdens on taxpayers accustomed to meet their obligations by writing a cheque instead of visiting a bank and paying for the issue of a banker’s pay order?

The bottom line is that the IRD must be more taxpayer friendly than it is at present. Printing platitudes like “Thank you for paying your taxes” on its stationary is just not enough. Honest taxpayers with files on record must not be bullied, as is often done at present, and burdens like the compulsory online payment requirement now imposed as well as the ‘no cheques’ rule must done away with. Also, the department must take note of the resentment of people who pay taxes long seeing those who do not getting away Scott free.

Saturday 7th December, 2024

The Rajapaksa governments used labels such as ‘traitor’ and ‘terror sympathiser’ to vilify their political opponents. They effectively created a bogey to rally support for their repressive actions, on the pretext of protecting national security, which they made out to be their raison d’etre. They succeeded in marketing their brand of patriotism to retain their hold on power and go on enriching themselves until they bankrupted the economy, provoking the public into rising against them. Most of those who voted for them became so frustrated in the end that they switched their allegiance to the JVP-led NPP, enabling its mammoth electoral wins.

The NPP government has moved to the other extreme. It promptly dubs those who flag potential threats to national security as ‘racists’ and enemies of ethnic reconciliation in a bid to prevent its opponents from criticizing its policies and actions aimed at consolidating its electoral gains in the North and the East. Several persons have already been arrested over what the government calls the dissemination of false information to promote racial disharmony and derail its reconciliation efforts. The CID has gone to the extent of using the much-dreaded Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA), which the NPP bigwigs condemned during their opposition days, to deal with some social media activists who have highlighted a recent commemoration of slain LTTE members, including Velupillai Prabhakaran. It is a case of using a sledge hammer to crack a nut.

Thankfully, the draconian police action against the aforesaid suspects has not passed muster with the judiciary. When some of them were arrested and produced in court, recently, Colombo Chief Magistrate Thilana Gamage pointed out that the CID should have taken action against the organisers of the commemorations at issue rather than those who reported on them. The suspects were released on bail. On Thursday, Colombo Additional Magistrate Manjula Ratnayake likened such police action to shooting the messenger, when the CID produced in court another person arrested for using social media to highlight the commemoration of dead LTTE members. That suspect was also granted bail.

If anyone abuses social media to incite racial hatred and disseminate misinformation to disrupt social order by destabilising ethno-religious relations and instigating violence, he or she must be severely dealt with, according to the law. But that task does not require the invocation of the PTA; there are enough and more other laws that can be used for that purpose. Above all, arrests must not be politically motivated, and the police must not provide their service to the politicians in power as stormtroopers or hunting Mastiffs on the pretext of bringing ‘the enemies of national reconciliation’ to justice. They must desist from making arrests at the behest of politicians. Many police high rankers unashamedly did political work for previous governments so much so that one wondered whether they had sold their souls to the rulers of the day, such as the Rajapaksa brothers, Ranil Wickremesinghe and Maithripala Sirisena. Worryingly, some of those puppets in uniform are occupying key positions in the Police Department and serving the interests of the incumbent government. No wonder they swoop on the critics of their current political masters at the drop of a hat.

The Rajapaksas realised that they had failed to fool all the people all the time, only when they had to head for the hills, with angry mobs in close pursuit, after bankrupting the country. Their method of labelling and vilifying their political opponents came with a short sell-by date. It will be a huge mistake for the JVP/NPP leaders not to learn from the dreadful experience of the Rajapaksas. Demonising political rivals is no substitute for effective governance and fulfilling promises.