Working for a very, very rich bully

By Chan Quan Min

Tiger gives a taste of what it’s like to work for a government agency that pays well, handles over a hundred billion ringgit a year but can sometimes be a big bully. Dig in for more.

Who says you can’t find a well-paying job in government? You absolutely can if, like Tiger, you know exactly where to look.

Mind, Tiger’s definition doesn’t include quasi-governmental agencies like Pemandu (Performance Management and Delivery Unit), AIM (Agensi Inovasi Malaysia), SPAD (Land Transport Commission) or TalentCorp.

Employees at those snazzy outfits under the Prime Minister’s Department are paid top ringgit, matching private sector wages. They also get to call themselves “consultants” and be all action around regular civil servants.

But as contract workers they miss out on the medical benefits, lifetime pension and job security Malaysia’s civil servants have come to expect. Don’t worry; they get compensated for not having those perks in cold hard, present value cash.

Whether you’re just starting out or a couple of years into your career, Tiger’s got a place for you. Just make sure you know your way around numbers.

This government agency will this year get an allocation of RM190,000 per employee, according to estimates by Kelana Jaya first-term MP Wong Chen. That’s about RM15,800 per employee per month.

If you manage to score a job here you will have 11,000 colleagues who last year collectively handled RM130 billion. You will hear from one of your many colleagues with a mixture of delight and envy how they got a six-month bonus payment last year.

When you venture outside your office you will be respected by many but viewed with suspicion. Because more often than not you will bring bad news.

If you haven’t guessed already you will be working at the Inland Revenue Board, the federal government’s tax collection agency also known as the IRB or in Malay, LHDN.

Your job will have tough KPIs or key performance indicators because you are a ‘corporatised’ agency. At least one of the KPIs is based on meeting tax collection targets.

To meet your targets you will be extra judicious in your tax audits and hope the economy continues to grow so that your team will have more and more money to tax.

Your detractors, usually sneaky businessmen, will accuse you of being too hardworking, although you know it’s a euphemism for “you are going too far, mister/lady.”

You brush it off, because you are proud to belong to a government agency that is actually productive. You want to show them you don’t fit the unpleasant stereotype of the lazy and unambitious civil servant.

So you see, contrary to common belief, you don’t have to work in the private sector or overseas to get good pay. You don’t have to slog on an offshore oil rig. You don’t have to cheat and steal.

But proud as you are of working at the IRB, it isn’t perfect. Perhaps you may start to question how it is ethical to accept your huge bonus calculated from tax collections.

Sure, you did all the hard work. But Tiger reckons other factors have a larger part to pay in determining the size of your bonus. Many reasons contribute to the growth of tax collections year-on-year. Economic and population growth play a large part.

But it is your higher-ups that can be more solidly accused of questionable practices. After all, you are just a cog in the wheel.

Your higher-ups tried to sneak past Parliament a bill that would set up an investment panel in the IRB with powers to invest taxpayers’ money in stocks and corporate bonds. These are considered risky investments.

You see, the IRB gets every year in government allocations more than it can logically spend. Hence, the six-month bonus to staff and the hundreds of millions of ringgit stashed away in the reserve account. The investment panel will presumably put these excess funds to work.

From what Tiger gathers, these higher-ups are your bosses at the Ministry of Finance, not your bosses at the IRB. The Ministry of Finance calls the shots on this initiative.

For one, Finance Minister Najib Abdul Razak (who is also Prime Minister) gets to appoint the majority of the seven members of the investment panel, according to the last draft of the bill.

Then there is IRB’s silence on the matter, preferring instead to let Ministry of Finance officials do the talking.

Wong Chen, the PKR politician with John Lennon (or Harry Potter) spectacles who blew the lid on the controversial bill, seems to think it is all Najib.

Wong suspects the real reason Najib postponed the bill to October was because of push back from “international financiers and rating agencies.”

“When it comes to the international finance types, he sits up and listens,” Wong said.

Tiger has another theory. Well, its not entirely Tiger’s theory, a sagely tax advisor was the first to tell him this:

It’s only a matter of time before everyone involved realises that allowing a tax agency to trade in stocks opens the door to the illegal activity of insider trading, that is, buying shares with market-moving information not known to the public (read: company tax returns).

More on the potential for insider trading is in part two of our two-part series on questionable practices by the IRB. Scroll to the first subheading called “Insider information.”

But what really gets Tigers claws out is the bullying. It’s unimaginable that a tax agency could chase a company in the courts up to the Court of Appeal – lose – then go against the judgement by changing the law.

This is what happened to a pharmaceutical firm called Eli Lilly (M) Sdn Bhd, which won a Court of Appeal case against the IRB to classify money spent on conference participants as business expenses.

More on this also in part two of our two-part series on questionable practices by the IRB. Scroll to the last subheading.

It doesn’t matter that Eli Lilly won in the courts because the IRB can change tax law. This is exactly what it did after losing the case at the highest court for such matters. It added a clause to the Income Tax Act to favour its own interpretation.

In one fell swoop, the IRB put to waste hours of time spent by judges and lawyers in interpreting the law and hundreds of thousands of ringgit spent on legal fees.

“Don’t mess with me” is the message the IRB is sending out. If that isn’t bullying I don’t know what is

Tiger would say, “let’s talk it out.” But it seems the IRB is having none of that.

The tax agency is a contradiction that puzzles. On one hand it’s a real example of the standard and productivity of work that can be achieved when you motivate and pay well. On the other, it is increasingly getting itself involved in questionable practices.

So, go and work for them if you want to earn big bucks. But if you’re an idealistic and sensitive soul, you would do better somewhere else. A charity perhaps? Because that is the furthest thing from the IRB.

GRRRRR!!!