Day 1 of NTC: The Good, The Bad & The Ugly

Today was the first of two days of the National Tax Conference. Its an event attended mostly by people within the industry, sometimes those who don’t work in the industry but “are interested”, those who have nothing better to do and those looking for free food and no work for two days at the expense of companies who send them.

Compared to the previous years, today was both better and worse. Better in a sense that the venue’s management fixed its air-conditioning (last year’s humid tropical theme wasn’t very fun) and so far, the speakers are presenting their topics rather clearly (I so did not appreciate the guy from Hong Kong last year)… Well, okay, there was the QC fella who called the Director General, “Dato’ Hummus” but I’m not sure anybody was awake enough to catch that.

It was worse in a sense that there was no representative from the Ministry of Finance to officiate the ceremony. At least last year, they sent Mr. Backup-aka-FM2. Hmmm… wait. Let me rethink whether that’s good or bad. Or maybe its starting to get ugly up in Permatang Pauh, no ministers or deputies to spare.

Having attended quite a number of conferences, one repeating theme never fails to annoy me. There’s always an answer that goes, “This is a policy matter, so, I can’t give a shit comment.” If its bloody policy, then get an authority on policy! You’d think that after 8 years of the same excuse, the organisers should have the sense to find someone who can answer policy questions. No points for guessing who that might be. What’s the point of a tax conference if most questions on tax policy are left hanging? You say its not the right forum to solve such issues or that a committee or task-force of experts would need to examine and test run and study all the facts and stats of the world to death before policy questions can be answered.

I say, bull.

The theme of the conference is “Towards an Excellent Delivery System” or something like that. First question of the day and the answer was, “It’s a policy matter, so… blah blah blah (not for me to answer)”. Yeap. Pretty excellent, I’d say.