The Foreign Service Journal, December 2018

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | DECEMBER 2018 59 employees to training, and after four or five years send them again to update their knowledge and skills. During the years that the U.S. embassy was under the value-added tax (VAT) reimbursement program, our office had to deal not only with different offices at the ministry of finance but with different ways of interpreting the law to get the reim- bursement. As you can imagine, it was not an easy task to go through the different offices talking to Paraguayan government employees about the reimbursement. The process to get the money back from the government of Paraguay was long and complex. I started looking for a way to solve this problem to the benefit of both the U.S. embassy and the ministry of finance. I worked very closely with the Paraguayan embassy in Wash- ington, D.C., and the Paraguayan government to find a way for the official Americans to avoid paying the VAT, and thus avoid the need for reimbursement. I worked hard with the ministry’s legal advisor on possible solutions. I had the idea of not paying the VAT at the point of purchase to avoid the reimbursement process. At the beginning, they considered my idea hard to put in place. After one year of working on it, we created a VAT exemption card and drafted the law and regulations to imple- ment it. The minister of finance was very happy and presented it to the minis- try of foreign affairs. The solution was accepted and put into effect. This card not only benefits the U.S. embassy and other embassies but also the govern- ment of Paraguay, because it doesn’t need to reserve funds to cover the reim- bursement. The most interesting thing about my job is the opportunity to know and work with many different people, both inside and outside the embassy. The opportunity to grow professionally, to listen to U.S. employees’ experience in other countries and to share my experiences with col- leagues from other U.S. embassies so we can learn from each other is rewarding. And I appreciate the respect with which my colleagues from other embassies and government offices treat me. The hardest thing about my job is the change of U.S. supervisors every three years. It is not easy for local employees to deal with changes, just as it isn’t for American employees. It takes time to adjust to each other; get to know each other; understand how to work together; and learn what the U.S. supervisor expects from the local employees, what things we should not say or do, the changes in the procedures and any changes in the preparation of the letters, diplomatic notes and memos. There is also the continuous change of our contacts at the Paraguayan government ministries; we have to be continu- ously building good business relationships with the new ones to facilitate our clearance process. Facilitating Cooperation with Host-Country Officials n YARDEN BERKOVITZ, CRIMINAL FRAUD INVESTIGATOR, REGIONAL SECURITY OFFICE, U.S. EMBASSY BRANCH OFFICE, TEL AVIV, ISRAEL Disrupting organized crime is one of our primary goals at the U.S. Embassy Branch Office in Tel Aviv. To be able to do this success- fully, criminal fraud investigators (CFIs) and assistant regional security officers for investigation (ARSO-I) need close contact with Yarden Berkovitz.