Richard?Lord

T&T will seek ex­ten­sion from the Unit­ed States Gov­ern­ment of the Sep­tem­ber 30 dead­line for im­ple­men­ta­tion of the For­eign Ac­count Tax Com­pli­ance Act (FAT­CA).

This was the out­come of a 30-minute meet­ing yes­ter­day be­tween Gov­ern­ment and the Op­po­si­tion to dis­cuss the pro­posed leg­is­la­tion.

Fol­low­ing talks at the Par­lia­ment Build­ing in Port-of-Spain, Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert told re­porters: "What we are go­ing to do now is speak to the US Trea­sury to see if we can get an ex­ten­sion of time to al­low a prop­er Joint Se­lect Com­mit­tee (JSC) ses­sion to take place af­ter the bud­get."

He said he was con­fi­dent the re­quest will be grant­ed, adding that Gov­ern­ment had agreed "to fa­cil­i­tate the Op­po­si­tion with a prop­er JSC, not a rush job and not a piece­meal job."

In an im­me­di­ate re­sponse, Op­po­si­tion Leader Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar, who did not at­tend the hasti­ly arranged meet­ing, said she was hap­py about the de­vel­op­ment. At last Fri­day's sit­ting of the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives she had said the Op­po­si­tion would not be sup­port­ing the bill with­out amend­ments.

Per­sad-Bisses­sar said she had al­ways felt there was suf­fi­cient time "for arrange­ments to be made in or­der to get good leg­is­la­tion passed rather than rushed leg­is­la­tion."

She added: "This con­ces­sion by the Gov­ern­ment shows that it has tak­en our con­cerns on board and we wel­come those con­ces­sions."

Per­sad-Bisses­sar said the Op­po­si­tion's con­cerns were about "in­va­sion of pri­va­cy, in­suf­fi­cient pro­vi­sions for par­lia­men­tary scruti­ny and for the dra­con­ian and in­tru­sive pow­ers be­ing giv­en to the Min­is­ter of Fi­nance in the bill."

Chief Whip Gan­ga Singh led the three-mem­ber Op­po­si­tion team, which in­clud­ed Ca­roni Cen­tral MP Dr Bhoen­dra­datt Tewarie and Na­pari­ma MP Rod­ney Charles. The Gov­ern­ment team com­prised Im­bert, Plan­ning Min­is­ter Camille Robin­son-Reg­is and Min­is­ter in the Of­fice of the Prime Min­is­ter Stu­art Young.

Emerg­ing from the meet­ing first, Op­po­si­tion MP Tewarie said the pro­pos­al to have the leg­is­la­tion put be­fore a JSC had been re­ject­ed when it was first made by Per­sad-Bisses­sar dur­ing her con­tri­bu­tion to Fri­day's de­bate on the leg­is­la­tion.

Tewarie de­scribed the meet­ing as "short but good" and said Gov­ern­ment was giv­en every com­mit­ment "that we are pre­pared to work with them to en­sure that the bill is passed by the dead­line. And we in­di­cat­ed that we want­ed to do that through a Joint Se­lect Com­mit­tee process." He said if that re­quired par­lia­men­tar­i­ans to work "over the com­ing week­end, or at nights, we will work with them to make sure that we could pass the bill in Par­lia­ment be­fore Sep­tem­ber 30."

Min­utes lat­er Im­bert and his team emerged and said there ap­peared to be some mis­com­mu­ni­ca­tion about the meet­ing as Gov­ern­ment had been pre­pared to look at the bill clause by clause. He said when the Op­po­si­tion in­sist­ed on a JSC they were told of the dif­fi­cul­ty with that pro­pos­al as Gov­ern­ment was not in favour of a "rushed" JSC and want­ed stake­hold­ers such as the Bankers' As­so­ci­a­tion of T&T (BATT), the Se­cu­ri­ties Ex­change Com­mis­sion, Board of In­land Rev­enue (BIR) and oth­ers to par­tic­i­pate.

"I would have pre­ferred we did it to­day but we are go­ing to give the process to the JSC, as was re­quest­ed, and make sure that is done prop­er­ly, rather than rush­ing it through," he said.

Im­bert de­nied that the Fi­nance Min­is­ter will have ac­cess to per­son­al bank­ing in­for­ma­tion un­der the pro­posed leg­is­la­tion.

"Ab­solute­ly not and we are not go­ing to al­low that," he said.

The mea­sure is ex­pect­ed to im­prove the ex­change of tax in­for­ma­tion be­tween the two coun­tries and en­sure that US cit­i­zens earn­ing in­come in this coun­try pay their tax­es. The leg­is­la­tion pro­vides for the Act to be ad­min­is­tered by the Board of In­land Rev­enue (BIR).