වැට් වංචාවේ හෙළි නොවූ රහස්
As the VAT fraud case ended with a verdict on a former Inland Revenue commissioner, one of thirteen accused of whom only five were ever arrested, Ivan recalls that Ravaya first exposed the fraud, the largest tax fraud in a South Asian state institution, on 26 June 2005, because the authorities had failed to act. He criticises the incomplete investigation, the ease with which an accused obtained travel documents and left, as in the forged-passport case of Rizana Nafeek, and the failure to honour the Auditor-General’s officer who uncovered the fraud.
කූට ලේඛන සංස්කෘතිය (ජාතික හැඳුනුම්පත හා ගමන් බලපත්රය)
Answering officials who disputed details in his series on the bureaucracy, Ivan stands by his accounts and then turns to how deep forgery runs. Using Dayananda Dissanayake’s Nuwara Eliya deal, he calculates the Treasury’s loss at over Rs. 6.1 million on one plot. Birth certificates without serial numbers, a corrupt identity-card office that issued LTTE suicide bombers genuine-looking cards, and a passport office that keeps no copies have created an industry, fed above all by the trade in underage and overage housemaids for the Middle East. Forgery, he says, now runs from school admissions to medical licences and doctorates.
රිසානා ඛේදවාචකය හා තරුණ පරපුරේ සිහිනය
Ivan argues that the execution of Rizana Nafeek exposes a rotten state as much as a harsh foreign court: it was Sri Lankan institutions that turned a child into an adult on her birth certificate, passport and medical papers. Migrant workers’ remittances are now the economy’s largest earner, yet housemaids are treated worse than beggars. He urges the state to replace the export of housemaids with trained craftsmen, making vocational training compulsory for school leavers and and sending them abroad, as graduates of the German technical institute at Ratmalana already go.