by Ken Quintanilla

Guam - The Office of Public Accountability will no longer conduct any audits of the Department of Revenue & Taxation until they're granted access to data that was recently denied to them. However, recent legislation may change just that.

It was earlier this week when the OPA issued a release noting they encountered challenged in trying to conduct an audit of Hotel Occupancy Taxes. Audit supervisor Rodalyn Gerardo says Rev & Tax denied the OPA full access to data, so as a result they could not "verify the completeness, reliability and accuracy" of the HOT data. "Unfortunately, even though DRT said they wanted to work with us and because of their law it was prohibiting them giving us the information we needed to conduct our audit properly," she explained.

Hotel Occupancy Taxes is an excise tax assessed at 11% that hotels are required to collect and file with DRT and pay at the Treasurer of Guam monthly. Rev & Tax director John Camacho says they did cooperate with the OPA but only with information they were legally allowed to protect taxpayer confidentiality. "We did give her everything she asked, except we redacted those data, and we're just protecting the tax payers information," he said.

Public auditor Doris Flores Brooks says this is the first time a compliance audit was on the HOT data. It's also the first time the OPA has encountered this type of problem. Bill 432 however may change that, as she said, "Because access to state revenue information is part and parcel of the role of any state auditor, just like for Guam access to our local revenues, which includes not just hotel occupancy tax, gross receipts tax, real property tax, and all of that."

Bill 432 introduced by Vice Speaker BJ Cruz and Michael San Nicolas would allow the public auditor access to certain tax records. Brooks adds despite over 1,000 hours put into it, the HOT audit did not materialize as she had hoped. Brooks said, "But we have told the Vice Speaker Cruz and Senator San Nicolas, we don't intend to do any audits at DRT unless we have access, we just said that was ours, were not going to waste our time, because this was really wasting our time This took a lot of time."

Camacho in the meantime says he is still analyzing the one-page measure before he can take any position.