?Finance Minister Karen Tesheira owes the country a formal explanation as to why the Review of the Economy was not included in the bundle of documents distributed during last week's presentation of the 2010 budget.
On September 7, when she presented the budget, Ms Tesheira explained that the document was not included because it contained an error. The standard practice for important, time-sensitive documents that have been found to contain errors after they have been printed is that an errata sheet outlining the errors is folded into the document. This was not done. Indeed, for seven days The Review of the Economy was simply unavailable for scrutiny of those who would normally give it close attention as the only document in the budget bundle which provides some means of measuring the Government's performance for the fiscal year. On the eighth day, the Review mysteriously became available as it was handed out to parliamentarians just as the Minister of Finance was about to wind up the budget debate. There was no indication from the minister as to whether this was the same error-containing document or if those copies had been dumped and a new error-free Review of the Economy published.
If the document does in fact contain a significant error, the responsible action for the Ministry of Finance to take, even at this late stage, would be to bring the error to the public's attention. A possible remedy would be for the ministry to arrange to publish a corrected version of the document in one of the daily newspapers. While we are not arguing that the Minister of Finance deliberately suppressed the Review of the Economy in order to prevent the Opposition from being armed with the appropriate ammunition, she should explain the timing of distribution of the document. The unavailability of the document during the budget debate which followed Minister Tesheira's presentation placed the parliamentarians at a disadvantage of not having any reference to how badly the T&T economy performed in the 2009 fiscal year. Although the final accounting for 2009 remains incomplete as the fiscal year still has 11 days left, the picture painted by the Review of the Economy does not make for happy reading. The document indicates that the Government collected nearly $56.8 billion in the 2008 fiscal year and that it projects that it will collect $37.9 billion in the 2009 fiscal year–an estimated decline of $19 billion between the two periods.
Taxes on the income and profits of oil companies amounted to $25.6 billion–45 per cent of total revenue–in 2008. But the document indicates that taxes on oil companies are likely to decline to $11.7 billion in the 2009 fiscal year–about 30 per cent of the total revenues. The budget document, or more properly the post-budget document, indicates that in April 2009, based on an oil price of US$45 a barrel and a natural gas price of US$3.25, the revenue was further revised downwards to $37.9 billion. If this information is correct, it would mean that the Government knew at least four months before the budget presentation that the fiscal deficit for 2009 would amount to $8.5 billion or 6.3 per cent of GDP. Now that the document has been made public, members of the Senate should make full use of it as they frame the debate on the Government's 2010 budget in the Upper House, which begins on Tuesday.