There is no "political control over everything that happens in public services" answered Finance Minister Maria Luís Albuquerque to questions in parliament seeking to find out who, if anyone, was responsible for the VIP Taxpayers List, if indeed it does exist despite her earlier denial.
The opposition emphasised the need for some "political responsibility" in the case and renewed its demand for the Secretary of State for Fiscal Affairs, Paulo Nuncio, to resign.
The minister, who gives her full backing to Nuncio, said there was no government involvement at all in the creation of a list of special VIP taxpayers who must not be disturbed due to their huge importance.
Albuquerque said that the government 'did not want a public administration that feared to perform its functions because it has to ask the Government for permission for everything.'
The minister said that 'more developed countries' are more autonomous and their public servants are more responsible, admitting that in Portugal, maybe we had too much political control of the civil service in the past.
This cunning answer in fact is a way for the minister in charge to blame anything that goes wrong on the civil service, while she glides serenely over the problem. This tactic simply is trying to avoid taking responsibility for a department whose behaviour and actions are her responsibility.
Albuquerque also said that she did not want apportion blame without knowing the findings of the ongoing investigation by the General Inspectorate of Finance. One thing is for sure, the responsibility will fall to someone in the lower ranks rather than disrupting her day.
Nuncio is the favourite to go. He is a big enough name to settle the affair in good time before for the pre-election campaigning starts in earnest.
This week’s damning report in Visão magazine revealed an audit report from the Tax Authority dated November last year which indicated the existence of computer alerts that are sent out when there certain tax records are accessed – i.e. records on the VIP List.
The communist MP Paulo Sá also questioned Maria Luís Albuquerque on the existence of "private companies whose employees have access to the tax authority databases."
The MP did not name companies but the answer from Albuquerque still was flimsy, "What I believe is that there may be subcontractors in the area of computer services, systems maintenance ... of course, there must be mechanisms to protect tax data."
Albuquerque and her tax department seem to play lip service to the idea of treating all taxpayers equally and she appears not to know, or is not prepared to be truthful, about third party access to the national taxpayer database by the company Homeostase using an application called Splunk to process and analyse large amounts of data for as yet undefined purposes. If she is still uncertain, the software is licensed to a gentleman called Marco Paulo de Abreu.
The buck stops with the minister and if she indeed ends up blaming those lower down the food chain, Albuquerque can be lumped with all the other disappointments who have managed to accept the salary, power and kudos of a ministerial position but have failed to accept the responsibility that goes with it.
Comments
That there is a strata of special people - VIP's - in Portugal is learnt at primary school. How it manifested itself in tax matters - or more obviously in non tax matters - would have been learnt by every tax inspector within the first week.
Not least because some of their 'apparent' colleagues were also in this strata.
'Apparent' as they were on full pay yet rarely in the office. When 'at work' doing mysterious work that they just smiled about when questioned.
Placed there by their VIP families ! Why else is Barroso's son in the Bank of Portugal itself if not to supervise Dad's nest egg in these times of trouble with Portuguese banks ?