President John Evans Atta Mills says he has evidence of corrupt practices, including abetment of cocoa smuggling by unscrupulous officers in the Customs, Excise and Preventive Services (CEPS). “I have pain in my heart, because some of your colleagues are spoiling your good name. I’m getting daily reports about acts of collusion, about bribery, about under-valuation, and worst of all I have first-hand evidence of customs officers helping smugglers to smuggle goods across our borders. In one I have a video of this. My brothers and sisters I know how hard some of you are working, how selfless some of you have been, but you are the largest revenue mobilizing agency, if therefore there is a hole in your collection it affects the whole economy. People have been criticizing us ‘we have not seen anything, we have not seen anything’, they have forgotten that when we took over, the huge budget deficit, domestic primary balance was in the negative which meant that we were consuming more than we were collecting,” he told officials of CEPS during an unannounced tour of offices of the revenue agencies on Tuesday. The president, whose tour took him also to the Internal Revenue Service; Value Added Tax Secretariat and the Finance Ministry, emphasized that the malaise is a huge drawback on efforts to grow the economy and told the officials it is time to do some introspection. “CEPS must live up to its expectation and its standard because in quite a number of cases we are under-collecting. If I ever doubted that some of the people in CEPS were really working against the economy, what I saw with my own eyes and heard with my ears convinced me beyond any reasonable doubt that if this is a person who has sworn to work in the interest of our nation and he can boast so brazenly and even aide smugglers to carry up cocoa across the border, I am saying, my brothers and sisters, this is the time for introspection,” he said. The president urged the tax agencies to attend to their work with zeal, and collect as much as they need to collect to aid national development. This they must do without fear or favour, and look to bring into the tax net all income earners who must pay taxes but do not because they are able to escape. President Mills suspected that among this group of tax dodgers are those who scream the loudest that they have no monies in their pockets and that the times are hard, meanwhile they would be the same persons who approach the revenue agencies in the name of the government to plead for favours. Mr. Isaac Apronti, Deputy Commissioner of CEPS in charge of Research and Monitoring, who responded to the President’s concerns told journalists some of the allegations and cases are before the commission and are being dealt with. He said the difficulty for the agency in fighting corruption is that a lot of the time those who make the allegations fail or refuse to support the claim with evidence. He however assured that CEPS accepts President Mills’ challenge and will work hard to earn his full commendation the next time he visited the institution. Mr. Apronti was however grateful for the president’s visit, rating it the first ever visit by any sitting president of Ghana to CEPS in its 170 years of operations. Story by Isaac Yeboah/Myjoyonline.com/Ghana