With the country’s oil and gas sector booming, the Guyana Revenue Authority (GRA) has admitted that it currently lacks the capacity to conduct full audits of the oil companies, even as the same oil companies and their sub-contractors continue to hire away staff from the GRA.
On Monday, the Commissioner General of the GRA, Godfrey Statia appeared before the Public Accounts Committee, and said the GRA is running thin on staff for its Petroleum Revenue Department.
He told the Public Accounts Committee that the GRA is desperately in need of auditors with the requisite qualifications. He said the situation has resulted in the GRA’s Petroleum Revenue Department being operated with a skeletal staff.
“So instead of training only person for oil and gas, you take a wide cross-section of everybody and then you take the best and you put them there,”Mr. Statia suggested as one of the ways to help the situation.
The Department requires 67 staffers to function to capacity. There are currently less than 20 staffers in the department. The Head of the GRA said he believes that the department can function optimally, “in a couple of years”, explaining that oil and gas audit is technical, and therefore persons being hired for the department must be well qualified and specially trained.
“Oil and gas training is a technical aspect of taxation, and you do not meet that level almost immediately—anytime I see an oil and gas file, there are a lots of things that are not dealt with and I am sure the Auditor General will pick up same, because we need to look specially for some specific transactions where you will find a lot of profit shifting and transfer pricing between the related companies in the oil and gas industry,” Mr. Statia told the PAC.
Despite the explanation by the GRA Commissoner General, the Government Members of the PAC, Dr. Vishwa Mahadeo and Dharamkumar Seeraj urged Mr. Statia to see how best he can correct the situation as a matter of urgency.
Mr. Mahadeo said based on Statia’s explanations, the 2023 and 2024 Audits are likely to come with a lot of queries because the GRA was not able to cover the oil company’s accounts properly.
For his part, Mr. Seeraj said he believes that with all that has been said about ExxonMobil’s and its dealings and its records, the GRA must equip itself to ensure that it can deal with the audits that need to be done.
“I would like to urge that whatever the GRA is doing now that they also accelerate at a pace that will match that of the developing oil and gas sector and we are going to get bigger and bigger and I don’t know whether 67 (staff) is going to be adequate enough in five years’ time so we have to do whatever it takes to get the staff in there to do the work of the Petroleum Revenue Department,” Seeraj urged.
When pressed with questions by Opposition Member Juretha Fernandes on how the Authority will conduct the audits, Mr. Statia explained that the vacumn does not extend to auditing the entire book of oil companies, but to auditing the more technical aspect which is cost oil.
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