A culture change?!

In a meeting held at the Mediterranean Conference Centre last Tuesday, the Ministry of Finance launched a new strategy for tax and customs administration. Among the guests present for the launch there were representatives of the International Monetary Fund.

During the same meeting, Tax Commissioner Joseph Caruana said the new strategy aims to make the tax collection service faster, more simplified, data-driven, effective, efficient, personalised and user-friendly.

Tax evasion is rife in Malta. It has always been. There were times when the tax on income was so prohibitive that this evasion was morally justified. Today the level of taxation on income is reasonable but tax evasion persists.

For a long time, the country dragged its feet over the enforcement of tax collection, but a change in culture is needed, Finance Minister Clyde Caruana said, because taxes constitute 85% of the government's revenue.

Old habits die hard and the minister’s task is no easy job.

However, new methods to fight tax evasion are going to be introduced. In the same meeting, Minister Caruana announced that the tax department is to be using new computer software that will automatically alert authorities when a person’s or business's declared income does not tally with their accumulated wealth. This will make it far easier and quicker for the authorities to immediately detect tax evasion and act on it.

The computer programme runs daily analyses of the wealth that people and companies own and matches it with the income they declare. In fact, the IT software, which - we were told - is already in use in the UK, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Ireland and Canada, will be analysing VAT returns by the end of the year and all other forms of taxes within the next three years.

Meanwhile, while Minister Caruana works hard to recover tax that is evaded, his partners in the Cabinet splash money as if the government has an inexhaustible source of cash. Clyde Caruana’s colleagues ignore our country’s financial situation and appoint Labour Party supporters and their friends and the friends of their friends to consultancy jobs that are unnecessarily gobbling up a good portion of the government’s income.

Whether this expenditure is necessary is, to say the least, very doubtful.

Ministers even announce projects that our country’s financial situation can hardly afford. But all ministers must show their constituents how much they love them! To be sure, a number of these projects make sense but their financing does not. Whether these projects are cost effective and whether the country can afford them, appears nowhere in the equation. Isn’t that for Minister Caruana to check?

There were times when the finance minister was the most powerful minister after the prime minister as he really had control over the country’s expenditure. In my days in politics, disputes about expenditure between the finance minister and his colleagues were an everyday part of running the country and the prime minister often had to intervene to settle the matter.

While Clyde Caruana is doing a fine job to collect taxes, his job of reining in the financial excesses of his Cabinet colleagues is not up to scratch.

This week, I received a cheque from the same Ministry of Finance that is striving for this culture change. It had a covering letter saying that the cheque was a reward for my hard work.

I got a bit confused since, while speaking in Qormi on Sunday, when the Prime Minister announced the posting of these cheques to all and sundry he said that this was one of a chain of social measures.

Since everyone received a cheque, it seems that everyone is considered a hard worker and we all merit an extra cheque every now and then - even if it doubles up as a social measure!

So, while everyone is a hard worker, not everyone pays the taxes that are due. This is almost a very good description of the Maltese people, were it not for those hangers-on who do nothing except receive money because they are direct or indirect state employees. But they got the cheque as well.

Everyone expecting cheques for nothing and being dubbed a hard worker has become normal routine. In fact, a footnote in the letter from the Ministry of Finance informed us hard workers how much was spent in rewarding hard work in the last six years!

If a culture change is needed in tax collection, a culture change is also sorely needed in the expectation of money for nothing that the Labour government has nurtured to keep its supporters happy while closing their eyes to corruption, inefficiency, waste and bad housekeeping.

They have a king

When the heir to the Dutch throne became king in 2013, he was inaugurated before parliament and delivered an address.

In 2014, Spain’s new king was sworn in before his country’s Members of Parliament in a ceremony during which the 18th-century crown was displayed but not placed on his head. On the menu at the reception for 2,000 guests that followed there were just afternoon tapas.

In Britain in 2023, the coronation of a new king brought a public holiday, a two-hour televised religious service, and a mile-long procession of mounted and marching troops - with musicians on horseback - and His Majesty traveling in the gilded Gold State Coach used in every coronation since its construction in 1762.

But for the Church of England, headed by the sovereign - the coronation is a ‘solemn religious ceremony’ with the invited people including the Lords Spiritual and Temporal of the Realm and involves beadles, heralds, princesses, kings, queens and His Most Godly Beatitude Theopilos III, Patriarch of Jerusalem and All Palestine.

Participants in the ceremony included those who hold the titles of the Rouge Dragon Pursuivant, the Rouge Croix Pursuivant and the Portcullis Pursuivant.

The ceremony included such artefacts as the Stone of Destiny, the Sword of Spiritual Justice and oil made with olives from the Monastery of Mary Magdalene in Jerusalem.

In the Coronation weekend, ‘Big Lunch’ festivities were held with some 50,000 street parties, picnics and other community gatherings, all with the permission of Buckingham Palace that let them eat cake!