Natural Resources and Violent Conflict - WaterWiki.net

46 swanson, oldgard, and lunde(U.K. National Audit Office 2000, p. 4). In turn, Inland Revenue has proceduresby which it must report to Parliament and publish informationrelated to all revenue collected. Safeguards within the Inland Revenuesystem include separation of assessment and collection responsibilitiesbetween different offices within the tax authority. Such an arrangement“minimizes the risk of collusion between the taxpayer and the InlandRevenue and the risk of misappropriation of tax receipts by thoseresponsible for making assessments” (U.K. National Audit Office 2000,p. 17). U.S. and Norwegian procedures are similarly well documentedand transparent.The OECD notes that, in its member countries, “the fiscal practicesthat promote integrity and accountability have been the subject of considerablediscussion in recent years and there has been much progressin defining appropriate practices.” Examples include the OECD’s BestPractices for Budget Transparency and the IMF’s (International MonetaryFund’s) Code of Good Practice on Fiscal Transparency. However,the OECD notes, “In troubled countries, fiscal frameworks may notincorporate even the most rudimentary principles for effective publicmanagement for both revenues and expenditures” (OECD 2002b, p. 15).Reporting Procedures in Developing Countries. In general, littlepublic information is available about the way in which developingcountryhost governments report revenue from their extraction andexport of resources. Furthermore, the collection and reporting of resourcerevenue in such countries are poorly covered in the academicliterature. Based on what has been written, however, reporting procedures,where they exist, often are rudimentary, perhaps deliberately so.In some cases, this may be due to lack of knowledge about best practice,but in others it may be part of a general tactic to avoid accountability.The observations of Ascher (1999) for the logging sector alsoprobably apply to revenue reporting in most high-rent natural resourcesectors in developing countries: “Apparently weak enforcement‘capacity’ is as much a choice as a ‘given,’ and lack of enforcement capacityis often part of the strategy of resource maneuvers.” Moreover,governments have reduced the public awareness of such maneuvers“by suppressing information, as in the minimal reporting requirementsfor timber companies in Indonesia, or by making financial transactionsand accounting so opaque that monitoring becomes virtually impossible,as in the case of the Nigerian and Mexican oil companies” (Ascher1999, p. 259).Unfortunately, Ascher and other authors we have reviewed do notprovide specific examples of these minimal procedures, where theyexist. Nor does the literature covering resource exploitation and revenue