Dear Editor,
In the last six weeks two different rooms in Guyana have delivered the same message to the same audience, and most of the audience missed it.
In April, at the ECONOME Business Conference’s Region Three investment forum, Michael Monroe of the Local Content Secretariat laid out the entry ticket(s) for any firm that wants to win an oil-and-gas contract. Four documents: the business’ registration, the business’ NIS, the owner’s TIN, and the owner’s ID. Firms without those four watch others win the work.
Yesterday at the Guyana Marriott, the Guyana Manufacturing and Services Association hosted a business luncheon with Hon Zulfikar Ally, Minister of Public Service, Government Efficiency and Implementation, to walk SMEs through the documentation the new Guyana Development Bank will require to lend. Different room. Different agency. Same message. If your house is not in order, the money walks past you.
That message is being read narrowly. Most of the business owners I speak with are taking it to mean the following: get your tax clearance up to date, pay your NIS contributions, and refresh the business registration. Treat it like an annual chore. File the paperwork, get back to running the business.
That reading is wrong, and the next four years will be expensive for the firms that hold it.
What compliance actually means now
Tax, NIS and business registration are not compliance. They are the price of being legally allowed to operate. They tell a regulator that your firm exists. They say nothing about how your firm handles money, who actually owns it, how it screens its customers, what it does with suspicious activity, or whether anyone inside the firm has the authority to stop a transaction that smells wrong.
Corporate compliance is that second category. It is the system of controls a firm builds to prevent it from being used, knowingly or unknowingly, to launder money, finance terrorism, evade sanctions, deceive a counterparty, or breach the duties it owes its customers and the public. It includes anti-money-laundering and counter-financing-of-terrorism programmes. It includes beneficial ownership disclosures that name the human being who actually benefits from the company. It includes internal audit functions, a compliance officer with real authority, written policies that are followed and not just printed, board-level oversight, employee training, and the discipline to file the right reports to the right regulator on time.
Most Guyanese firms have built none of this. The culture still treats compliance as a paperwork ritual, something you fix on a Friday afternoon before a registration lapses.
“The international principals who are arriving to write the contracts treat corporate compliance as the precondition for a relationship.”
The Compliance Commission Act is already on the books.
In August 2023, the National Assembly passed the Guyana Compliance Commission Act. It created an independent statutory body to supervise non-financial businesses and non-bank financial institutions for AML and CFT compliance. Accountants, lawyers, real estate agents, dealers in precious metals and stones, trust and company service providers, and others were brought into a registration regime. Beneficial ownership disclosures became a legal obligation. Higher-risk entities were told to appoint a compliance officer who meets a fit-and-proper standard and to commission an annual independent audit.
The penalties are not symbolic. Failure to register can attract a fine of GY$10 to 25 million and up to five years’ imprisonment. Obstructing an audit can cost up to GY$20 million and five years. Providing false information to the Commission can cost up to GY$10 million and three years. Administrative penalties run as high as GY$10 million, with daily fines of GY$100,000 for continuing breaches.
It has been on the books for nearly three years to allow businesses sufficient time to adjust to it, and enforcement comes next. Most reporting entities in Guyana have done nothing to comply with it. Many do not yet realise they are reporting entities.
A growing number will discover that they are reporting entities the hard way. The wake-up call will come when an oil major’s procurement team asks them for an AML programme they have never written, or when the Guyana Development Bank’s credit committee asks for board minutes documenting beneficial ownership verification.
The next wave of oil-and-gas suppliers is not competing on price. It is competing on whether it can pass a counterparty due diligence questionnaire. Most cannot.
And the same gap is sitting in the non-profit sector.
The Caribbean Financial Action Task Force mutual evaluation cycle for Guyana is approaching. CFATF’s standards require non-profits that handle cross-border donations to operate beneficial ownership controls, donor due diligence, and counter-financing-of-terrorism screening. Years after the first warning, most Guyanese NGOs have built none of this. The failure mode is not theoretical: small donations to apparently legitimate causes have funded violence elsewhere, and CFATF expects non-profit boards to engineer against that risk before it surfaces, not after. The sector deserves a longer treatment, and I will give it in a follow-up piece. For now, every non-profit board in this country should read the Compliance Commission Act, look at the international donor framework they accept funds under, and ask whether their organisation could withstand a serious examination. For almost all of them the honest answer is no.
The four years between now and 2029 will sort Guyanese firms into two groups. The ones that used the window to build real compliance systems. And the ones that kept treating compliance as an administrative chore and watched the contracts, the credit lines and the partnerships go elsewhere. The first group will be smaller than it should be. It does not have to be.