Departamento di Impuesto Con Ta Bai?
If you haven’t been burdened enough by bills, Ground Tax is in the mail. According to GOA you may pay it on July 1st, or in four installments, with the last one prior to January 4th 2021. We may also get an extended payment-plan, and we should call to arrange it.
Question: Where is the incentive to pay it ALL at once?
Why should I pay it all now, if I can pay it over time?
When will you learn to reward those who comply, not just attempt to punish those who don’t?!
I called to make an arrangement, #5227424. No one answered!
Last Night’s Town Hall Webinar
The fact that Armand Hessels and Rik van der Vaart were among panelist was a great move, a ray of sunshine in the barrage of GOA propaganda we are deluged by.
The fact that Armand & Rik can explain our core, deep-seated problems on a government sponsored webinar is a feather in the cap of our democracy.
Armand described 30 years under a flawed political system, that ignores all advice, and never reads any reports, recommending change and improvement.
The symptoms of sloppy financial organization, lack of transparency, and zero checks & balances, landed us into the arms of Covid19 as a critical patient, fit for the intensive care.
According to Armand this system of political patronage and its negative CONSEQUENCES has to be explained to the public, who will then understand its own contribution to the disaster, and be moved to make changes in our unsuccessful political mentality, no-win political culture, and our self-defeating political tradition.
Rik van der Vaart spoke well about delivering public service – see above my attempt to connect with the tax department. He talked about the challenges and waste in the public sphere, how much we do that’s redundant, and about the need to innovate, not just buying technology, but by looking at processes, how we do stuff, and examine if our system is relevant, perhaps some government services could be relegated to the private sector. Amen. (He must have meant Post-Office, Arubus, Aruparking, etc.)
I enjoyed listening to Indra Zaandam who was a government advisor for a while, then moved on. She basically told her own story, how an idealist goes to work for GOA, is overwhelmed by the amount of work GOA has undertaken, is overcome by the complexities, cannot please everyone, must pick and choose, must compromise, work day and night, wrestle old-timers, and the way things have always been done, and at the end of the day achieve little. She has great charisma and what she said was real.
QUESTION, back to Rik’s proposal: Perhaps we need a smaller GOA in charge of less things!
The Webinar public was asked a few questions in the style of what’s more important, the chicken or the egg, then as a conclusion, the forum suggested we need a series of good governance workshops, a code of conduct and corporate good governance supervision of both the public and the private sector.
Then we said good night.
Compliments to organizers, I left a few people out, Luenne Gomez Pieters & Ronald van Trigt, I felt they didn’t bring their real personalities to the forum, they said what they were expected to say.
