A story of waste, in the Public Sector

Evelyn sells merchandise in her store.

After she sells something for Awg 10, she deducts the cost of purchase, Awg 5; Awg 2 are charged towards fixed cost of personnel, one florin towards the fixed rent, one towards other fixed expenses she incurs running her business.

She books one-florin profit for the sale.

From the 10% profit margin she dutifully allocates about one third to pay profit tax. So the Awg 0.30 going to GOA is a result of her Awg 10 sale.

In other words, for every Awg 1 of tax money, the economy has to produce Awg 30. Waste one florin of tax money and the country has to come up with Awg 30 to recover that loss.

The value of ONE tax florin is thirty times the value of a florin in the day to day economy.

This simple example is meant to show how much more responsible and prudent a government organization must be, when handling our resources.

It stands to reason that they would want to create high value services for the public, streamline processes, introducing innovations, and working diligently on behalf of the people.

Imagine, for every Awg 1 paid to settle interest payments on loans, for example, we must generate 30.

Thus, if our national debt amounts to 5billion, then we have to earn 150 billion, just to settle that debt, keeping in mind that for GOA to run itself, it requires 1.5 million a day, so in the past two weeks of dilly-dallying we spend 21 million + the 240 million committed to pay people who aren’t working, 9 million in interest, and a HUGE liability we inherited for the refinery cleaning costs.

So, from the start of the CoVid19 crisis two misguided promises were made:

  1. MinPres promised not to touch GOA’s employees
  2. MinSal (social affair, labor) promise to give each unemployed individual Awg 950

While all other islands and countries – I just read about France –  set aside money to pay employees via the business they work for, Aruba is reinventing the wheel, “we are special and we do our own thing.”

Ok.

So the logical move would have been to funnel funds via SVB, they already have the infrastructure, the names, the numbers, the bank accounts, they are the perfect platform, we don’t need to fill in any new forms, we are already in the computer, if we are working, and the protocol of AO is similar to the protocol of Covid19, unemployment. The business pays employee, SVB compensates the business.

THEN SVB CLOSES, and makes the employer responsible for the FASA registration

Why? What? How come?

ANOTHER SYMPTOM of being inefficient, another complication introduced in a time when we need simplicity, NOT added layers of bureaucracy.

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April 03, 2020
Rona Coster