$47B in taxes owed
By SEAN DOUGLAS Thursday, June 23 2016
SOME $47 billion is owed in taxes to the State, a Parliament Public Accounts Committee (PAC) was told yesterday while examining the Ministry of Finance, at Tower D, Wrightson Road, Port-of-Spain.
However, only a portion of that sum has any chance of being recovered.
Replying to a query by PAC chairman Dr Bhoe Tewarie, Ministry permanent secretary (PS) Maurice Suite, put the $47 billion sum into context. The PS said that originally, $14 billion was incurred as taxes to the State, but since then, the addition of $33 billion in penalties and interest raised this debt to $47 billion. He said some of these debts have been outstanding since 1973. Suite added that of the original $14 billion, some $5 billion in taxes are now under appeal, with the other $9 billion being uncontested.
Yet, even the $9 billion is assured as Suite revealed that half of that debt is more than ten years old and so some individuals and companies in arrears have likely died/expired.
Board of Inland Revenue (BIR) head Nayak Ramdhin, said his division focuses on collecting current liabilities, rather than old debts that may be non-collectable.
Independent Senator Dhanayshar Mahabir said Government’s exchequer account is overdrawn by $33 billion, but Suite said the law limits the Central Bank’s advances to the Government to just 15 percent of the $60 billion National Budget, or a limit of $9.7 billion.
Mahabir used the occasion to question the Ministry’s ability to process pension claims, saying that he and others who’d served in the previous Parliament are still waiting on their parliamentary pensions some 18 months later. In reply he learnt that the Ministry had hired some contract workers to help process pension applications, although the Pensions Division needs restructuring.
Late pension payment was mainly blamed on late/incomplete submission of records, plus having to update a salary even after the person had retired. Government Senator Dr Lester Henry asked about computerisation of the Ministry by a Financial Management Information System. Suite replied that the Ministry will get a coordinator for this project before fiscal year-end, after which other staff will be recruited.
Port-of-Spain South MP Marlene McDonald, expressed alarm at a dearth of tax revenues from oil/ gas companies operating in TT. She lamented that the Ministry has no system to monitor the revenues received and receivable from energy companies. Suite said this overall role is instead the job of the Ministry of Energy, while the BIR monitors the individual companies.
McDonald asked Auditor General, Majeed Ali, if his office will look at this matter of monitoring energy revenues, to which he replied, “yesâ€.
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