The cost of doing business

For instance, if you pay $8 (instead of $6.80) for US$1 but it allows your business to close a lucrative deal, then that extra cost of doing business is well worth it. If you give an “incentive” to a doctor to prescribe your company’s drugs (instead of the competitors’), and he/she does, then that “incentive” is written off as the cost of doing business.

Pharmaceutical companies provide good examples. Many have paid hefty fines for various reasons.

For instance, in 2012 GlaxoSmith- Kline paid US$3 billion for offences including off-label promotion (promoting a drug for unapproved uses), failure to disclose safety data, paying kickbacks to physicians and making false and misleading statements about the safety of Avandia (diabetes drug).

Other companies paying onetime billion dollar fines include Pfizer (2009, US$2.3B), Johnson & Johnson (2013, US$2.2B), Abbott (2012, US$1.5B), and Eli Lilly (2009, US$1.4B). All these companies and others, like Merck, Norvatis and AstraZeneca, are repeat offenders. Repeat offenders? Clearly, to them, these fines are merely “the cost of doing business,” a small price to pay for the massive profits they make.

So when the Permanent Secretary (PS) in the Ministry of Sport proffered to the Public Administration and Appropriations Committee of Parliament that the $92,000 spent by her ministry for the Tobago weekend jaunt was “the cost of doing business,” I expected her to tell us about the million-dollar benefits we could expect from the money spent. She didn’t say and no one on the committee bothered to ask.

So I’m asking the PS to tell us what “business” they were doing and what was our expected return on investment.

She could also provide some clarity on the following. We hear that $10,000 was spent on the rental of four vehicles for three days, for a one-day (actually, two hours) function. That works out to over $800 a vehicle per day. What kind of vehicles did they rent? I’ve never spent more than $300 on any car rental in Tobago, and the car carried five people and two golf bags. Then, again, I’m neither a minister nor an assistant nor an adviser and I pay the rental from my own pocket (I don’t have an expense account “without a ceiling,” like the PS), so I try to get value for money.

In her defence, though, the PS did say she believed they got value for money. (Yes, and I believe the West Indies would have won the ICC Champions Trophy easily if only the team had qualified.) Given that the stay at the Magdalena Grand included buffet breakfast and all-you-can-eat lunch and dinner, how much time did they have between meals to drive around in these expensive vehicles? When did the “series of meetings and site visits” take place? Apart from a visit to the Dwight Yorke Stadium which, from all reports, few members of the delegation attended, what business did the delegation conduct? More importantly, can the PS tell us how did these “costs” of doing business redound to the benefit of taxpayers?

NOEL KALICHARAN via email