Pub­lic Ser­vices As­so­ci­a­tion (PSA) pres­i­dent Leroy Bap­tiste says de­spite yes­ter­day’s rul­ing of the Court of Ap­peal on the le­gal­i­ty of the T&T Rev­enue Au­thor­i­ty, the union is pre­pared to move on to the Privy Coun­cil to have their say in the mat­ter.

A Court of Ap­peal pan­el, which in­clud­ed Judges Nolan Bereaux, Char­maine Pem­ber­ton and Mi­ra Dean-Ar­mor­er, yes­ter­day dis­missed the PSA’s case af­ter rul­ing that the Trinidad and To­ba­go Rev­enue Act is valid and con­sti­tu­tion­al, and al­so does not breach the con­sti­tu­tion­al rights of pub­lic of­fi­cers.

This paved the way for Min­is­ter of Fi­nance Colm Im­bert to move on with plans to ful­ly es­tab­lish the au­thor­i­ty.

Im­bert, in fact, in­di­cat­ed his plan to do this in a post on X soon af­ter the rul­ing.

“We can now move swift­ly to im­prove and max­imise rev­enue col­lec­tion for the ben­e­fit of all our cit­i­zens,” Im­bert said.

How­ev­er, in an im­me­di­ate re­sponse to the rul­ing, Bap­tiste told the Guardian Me­dia that the PSA will be guid­ed by their at­tor­neys, “who will no doubt study the judg­ment and ad­vise ac­cord­ing­ly”.

He re­it­er­at­ed that from the start, they were “quite pre­pared to have our high­est court, the Privy Coun­cil, have its say in this mat­ter”.

In the law­suit, the PSA, through a mem­ber, had chal­lenged the con­sti­tu­tion­al va­lid­i­ty of the leg­is­la­tion, which seeks to re­place the Cus­toms and Ex­cise Di­vi­sion (CED) and the In­land Rev­enue Di­vi­sion (IRD) with the TTRA.

The law­suit specif­i­cal­ly fo­cused on Sec­tion 18 of the leg­is­la­tion, which gives pub­lic ser­vants three months to make a de­ci­sion on their fu­ture em­ploy­ment once the TTRA is op­er­a­tionalised.

Af­fect­ed pub­lic ser­vants will have the choice to vol­un­tar­i­ly re­sign from the Pub­lic Ser­vice, ac­cept a trans­fer to the TTRA, or be trans­ferred to an­oth­er of­fice in the Pub­lic Ser­vice.

Mean­while, To­ba­go Busi­ness Cham­ber chair­man Mar­tin George said while he com­mends the Gov­ern­ment on its suc­cess in the con­sti­tu­tion­al mo­tion with the PSA, it was not any cause for great cel­e­bra­tions, “as the main task of man­ag­ing and har­ness­ing the econ­o­my of T&T re­mains as the ma­jor chal­lenge for the Gov­ern­ment”.

George point­ed to the chal­lenges faced by busi­ness­es with get­ting forex, the haem­or­rhag­ing of bil­lions of tax­pay­ers’ dol­lars by sev­er­al State agen­cies wast­ing mon­ey and be­ing in­ef­fi­cient and in­ef­fec­tive. He said these ar­eas should be the fo­cus as op­posed to rais­ing a glass and toast­ing vic­to­ry.

—With re­port­ing by Rhon­dor Dowlat