— Ulrick Mentor left his desk at the Haitian tax office a few minutes
early on a Tuesday evening three weeks ago for an appointment. The
decision saved his life. Since then, the civil engineer has been back
to the federal building daily, leading a team of colleagues, working
under armed guard, as they struggle to retrieve the bureaucratic
foundation of Haitian society from the rubble of the four-story
structure.
“We have documents in here that go all the way back
to our independence — 200 years,” said Mentor, chief engineer of the
government tax office. He raised his voice to be heard over the pair of
hydraulic excavators that were slamming steel arms into the building’s
remains. “This is the history of our country.”
The
most iconic government buildings, including the parliament and the
ministries of justice and finance. But it was the collapse of the
Direction Generale des Impots that has most worried government
officials, business operators and property owners.
In the Haitian bureaucracy, modeled on its French
antecedents, the tax office’s responsibilities were far broader than,
for example, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. The process by which
Haitians obtained driver’s licenses, passports, car license plates, ID
cards and other important day-to-day transactions usually included a
stop at the tax office.
More important, this was where property deeds were registered — a crucial function in any country but especially so in
where disputes over land ownership are common. And, as in many
developing countries with unreliable electricity supplies, many of
those transactions were recorded on paper, often by hand.
On Thursday, the building’s surviving workers
climbed amid the piles of concrete and towers of gnarled rebar. All
around them was paper — forms in triplicate, log books and ledger pages
with entries made in cursive. Hundreds of government license plates
reclaimed from the building were in the back of a pickup. A stack of
special diplomatic license plates rose from the sidewalk, sharing space
with Haitian identity cards, notebooks and the smashed towers of
computers.
“We can’t let those things get into the wrong
hands,” said Montervit Etchoy, one of the tax office employees. He
paused to pick up a red leather book, “Memoirs of the Leader of the
Third World,” by Francois Duvalier. Leafing through it, he stopped on a
color photo of the tax office, a building the long-dead dictator
considered one of his important contributions to
Government officials still are trying to determine whether any irreplaceable documents are unrecoverable.
“There’s an important loss of data, no question,”
said Aramick Louise, the state director of public security. “But what
we don’t know is the magnitude of the loss.”
said most computer servers and other databases in government buildings
appeared to be intact, or are backed up in buildings that were not
affected. One of his ministry’s priorities is to retrieve blank checks
from the destroyed central bank building.
“We’re not sure, but it doesn’t seem that we’ve lost
too many important documents,” he said. “We’re still trying to recover
the most sensitive things.”
The most valuable papers in the tax office,
including property deeds, were kept in a bunker in the basement,
according to Mentor, the building engineer. He has crawled into an
undamaged section of the building and says the bunker appears to be
intact. Still, it will probably be days before the diggers reach it.
As important as the documents are, Mentor said, it’s
the loss of the tax office’s top four directors that will be the most
difficult to overcome.
The body of
director of operations, was pulled from the building this week as his
family watched from the sidewalk. “He was bright, intelligent and very
friendly,” Mentor said. “That’s the biggest loss, not just for those of
us who worked there, but for the whole country.”
—
(c) 2010, Los Angeles Times.
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