Contribute to report, firms urged

By CLARISSA MOI
COMPANIES and developers in the country’s extractive industry have been told to contribute to the Papua New Guinea Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative’s (PNGEITI) report.
Head of PNGEITI National Secretariat Lucas Alkan told the 2019 Mining and Petroleum Conference in Port Moresby on Thursday that they had published five EITI country reports from 2013 to 2017.
He said the reports were focused on payments made by the extractive companies to the Government and its receipts of those payments.
Alkan said PNGEITI would be publishing the sixth report soon.
He said payments made by extractive companies needed to be captured properly and published in the report.
“The value chain starts from exploration,” he said.
“EITI tries to bring about transparency in the process of issuing licence and contracts, and how the Government tax equity in those processes.
“We also capture information on the volumes and values of exports when companies are extracting those resources and starting to export.”
Alkan said they also collected information on revenue collection.
“There are different revenue streams and we try to collect information, corporate income tax, salary and wages tax, royalty payments and development levies, all these goes into the different state owned entities like MRDC (Mineral Resources Development Company) and KPHL (Kumul Petroleum Holdings Limited),” he said.
“These also goes into the report.
“Some of the payments made by the companies are not captured properly.
“We need to capture those into the EITI reporting process so that the people can know the entire impact that you make.”
He said there were two types of expenditures captured in the EITI report:
lMandatory: those that were required by law to pay taxes, and memorandum of agreements and memorandum of understandings; and,
lSocial: the community obligations that a lot of companies had contributed to that needed to be properly reflected in the EITI report.
“If all those information are not properly reflected, then you don’t see the total impact that the developers are making,” he said.