Money woes?

The Government of T&T’s financial year end is 15 days away. It coincides with the property tax payment date deadline.

Demand for cashier time for PAYE, Green Fund Levy, and quarterly tax would normally be high at this time. Adding property tax payments to 400,000 hereditaments compounds this demand.

As a result, we are seeing long queues at many GORTT revenue offices. Though not new, property tax has led to apprehension regarding the penalties for the non-payment.

Not everyone has received assessment notices or the relevant invoice. This has led to some confusion amongst taxpayers anxious to avoid the penalties and the administrative horror stories. In one case, a residential property jointly owned by a husband and wife has even led to two individual assessments, with two different assessment amounts for the same property. We can assume this was an anomaly. How many others are there like it?

Barring these snafus, the Finance Ministry and Inland Revenue ought to have made it possible to pay taxes electronically, in person and online. Given the stated intention to digitalise government business, why were there no online payment options?

The GORTT had enough time to prepare for this development, yet it has patently failed to do so. Why not? Why were there signs that indicated that LINX transactions would not be accommodated between September 12 and 30 because of the end of the financial year? Why does the financial year end make electronic payments difficult?

In the mid-year Budget Review, the Finance Minister estimated that the financial outturn would be a deficit of $9 billion. The Central Bank’s July 2024 economic bulletin said declines in both international commodity prices and domestic energy production resulted in a deficit of $4.3 billion on the central government accounts for the first nine of the fiscal year 2023/24.

Responding to complaints that repairs to some schools were not completed during the summer vacation, the Education Minister said the problem was money.

Also, the National Security Minister confirmed this week that the Coast Guard’s fleet of eight large patrol vessels (six built in the Netherlands and two by the Australian shipping group) is currently non-functional. He advanced no explanation worthy of repetition.

Scheduled maintenance for major pieces of equipment is a routine management function in any protective service. That all the major vessels are down simultaneously, leaving the national borders unprotected, is a gross dereliction of duty or a tacit admission that there was no budget for repairs.

How extraordinary, but reminiscent of the maintenance issues with the helicopters!

Therefore, making the tax collection process easy, efficient, and quick to encourage compliance should be a key objective of the Finance Ministry. The Government needs the money.

All electronic payment mechanisms should be deployed to ensure that the Government collects what is due every day, today and henceforward, not next year as promised by the Local Government Minister.

Given the foregoing, the Finance Minister must fulfil his responsibility to the country by ending the impasse with the Auditor General’s Office.

He must make every effort to provide the primary documentary evidence to allow the Auditor General to confirm that all government revenue is fully accounted for and included in the public accounts for 2023.

We do not want to repeat the negatives of the 2023 year-end audit exercise in 2024.

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