Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert says his min­istry is work­ing on an on­line so­lu­tion to as­sist prop­er­ty tax pay­ments which will be iden­ti­cal to bank ac­count trans­fer pay­ments, as is done for WASA and T&TEC bills.

“We’re very close to a so­lu­tion to this mat­ter, I ex­pect it to be im­mi­nent,” Im­bert added.

He, how­ev­er, couldn’t give a date for the start of the so­lu­tion.

Im­bert said the min­istry was al­so work­ing on ad­di­tion­al so­lu­tions us­ing cred­it and deb­it cards on­line. But he said be­cause of the re­cent “be­hav­iour of the Au­di­tor Gen­er­al,” an on­line pay­ment sys­tem was not so sim­ple.

Im­bert gave these de­tails in the Sen­ate yes­ter­day while re­ply­ing to ur­gent ques­tions from In­de­pen­dent Sen­a­tor Dr Paul Richards on prop­er­ty tax pay­ment is­sues.

Af­ter long lines of cit­i­zens try­ing to pay the tax by the Sep­tem­ber 30 dead­line, Richards asked if giv­en the im­mi­nent dead­line, ad­di­tion­al pay­ment op­tions and lo­ca­tions would be made avail­able to al­le­vi­ate the prob­lems.

Im­bert said, “There would be no ad­di­tion­al lo­ca­tions be­fore Sep­tem­ber 30, al­though ef­forts are be­ing made to ex­pand the ca­pac­i­ty of ex­ist­ing lo­ca­tions.”

How­ev­er, Im­bert ex­plained that ad­di­tion­al pay­ment op­tions were a “very com­plex mat­ter, made even more com­pli­cat­ed by the re­cent—I’ll use the word—‘be­hav­iour’ of the Au­di­tor Gen­er­al.”

Im­bert said prop­er­ty tax is rev­enue.

“So un­like your wa­ter and elec­tric­i­ty bills which we’re all ac­cus­tomed to pay­ing on­line, when the pay­ment is re­mit­ted to the rel­e­vant statu­to­ry au­thor­i­ty or even in the case of a phone bill—like Dig­i­cel, TSTT, etc—the fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tion deducts an ap­pro­pri­ate per­cent­age as a ser­vice charge for fa­cil­i­tat­ing the trans­ac­tion.”

He said un­for­tu­nate­ly, un­der the Au­dit and Ex­che­quer Act, there can be no de­duc­tion from rev­enue of a ser­vice charge.

“So what we’ve been look­ing at with re­spect to com­mer­cial banks is a sys­tem where they’ll act as a col­lec­tor of rev­enue, so that some­one would make an on­line pay­ment, banks will col­lect those pay­ments of prop­er­ty tax, record them ap­pro­pri­ate­ly, iden­ti­fy who paid for what, when and then re­mit the amount paid in full to the Trea­sury to go in­to the Con­sol­i­dat­ed Fund for it to be record­ed as rev­enue,” Im­bert said.

He said banks would then send a bill to the Fi­nance Min­istry for the ser­vice charge so that the pay­ment of rev­enue must al­ways be 100 per cent.

“There can be no de­duc­tion from it. That’s com­pli­ca­tion num­ber one. Com­pli­ca­tion num­ber two is that sys­tems must be in place to en­sure that pay­ment of the prop­er­ty tax is prop­er­ly record­ed as rev­enue,” Im­bert said.

“You’ll re­mem­ber that the source of the prob­lem—the im­passe as it’s called by the me­dia—be­tween Fi­nance Min­istry of­fi­cials, and now it ap­pears al­so the Cen­tral Bank and the Au­di­tor Gen­er­al, is a ques­tion of ac­cu­rate record­ing of rev­enue.

“So what I’d not want to hap­pen is a sit­u­a­tion where peo­ple make their prop­er­ty tax pay­ments on­line and it’s not prop­er­ly record­ed as rev­enue in the Con­sol­i­dat­ed Fund and then we’ll get an­oth­er re­port from the Au­di­tor Gen­er­al that will start an­oth­er set of con­fu­sion and bac­cha­nal,” he ex­plained.

How it’ll work

Im­bert said, “The process which we’re work­ing on will be an on­line process. It’ll be vir­tu­al­ly iden­ti­cal to the on­line pay­ment like bank trans­fer of your util­i­ty bills, so that those per­sons who have the fa­cil­i­ty to use their bank ac­count to make a bank trans­fer—as is now done with WASA and T&TEC—will be able to do that.”

Im­bert said he didn’t want to give a pre­cise start time at this point. He said just be­fore yes­ter­day’s Sen­ate, he met tech­nocrats work­ing on the so­lu­tion to en­sure it’s prop­er­ly record­ed.

“There are two things that must hap­pen: when the per­son pays the tax, they must get a re­ceipt from the Board of In­land Rev­enue con­firm­ing they’ve paid. Be­cause if you don’t get that, then you can end up in an ar­gu­ment and there might be even more con­fu­sion with re­spect to penal­ties and in­ter­est. So that’s is­sue num­ber one that must be dealt with.

“Is­sue num­ber two is a prop­er record­ing of the rev­enue in the Con­sol­i­dat­ed Fund. But we’re al­most at the end of a so­lu­tion that will deal with both so that when you pay on­line, you au­to­mat­i­cal­ly get a re­ceipt con­firm­ing pay­ment which you can present to the BIR if there’s a query and it’ll be prop­er­ly record­ed as rev­enue.”

No word on ex­ten­sion

Richards asked if an ex­ten­sion is be­ing con­sid­ered af­ter Sep­tem­ber 30. He cit­ed the com­plex­i­ties Im­bert spoke of, the fact that of the 400,00 el­i­gi­ble res­i­den­tial prop­er­ties that will be taxed, val­u­a­tion no­tices were is­sued for 175,000, the long lines at pay­ment cen­tres, plus Im­bert’s un­cer­tain­ty about when the on­line so­lu­tion will be­gin. Richards said it was a sort of tac­it ad­mis­sion that all the sys­tems may not be in place for mass pro­cess­ing.

Im­bert al­so replied to In­de­pen­dent Sen­a­tor Suni­ty Ma­haraj’s ques­tion on whether the Sep­tem­ber 30 dead­line ap­plies to home­own­ers who have not yet re­ceived their no­tice of prop­er­ty tax as­sess­ment.

Im­bert said a le­gal opin­ion from the Board of In­land Rev­enue (BIR) and Trea­sury’s So­lic­i­tor Gen­er­al de­part­ment stat­ed that if the fail­ure to pay the tax did not re­sult from the tax­pay­er’s fault, then the per­son isn’t li­able to penal­ties and in­ter­est.

Im­bert ex­plained that if they got an as­sess­ment us­ing the old prop­er­ty tax rate of three per cent, that’s in­valid. He said own­ers must get an as­sess­ment based on the new two per cent rate. He said if the BIR is un­able to de­liv­er a tax as­sess­ment no­tice to the tax­pay­er, the lat­ter’s not at fault and won’t be sub­ject to any penal­ties or in­ter­est.