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Saturday, May 3, 2025

Senate debates Tax Bill today

by

Gail Alexander
2342 days ago
20181203
UNC Senator Saddam Hosein

UNC Senator Saddam Hosein

The In­come Tax (Amend­ment) Bill is head­ing for de­bate in the Sen­ate on Tues­day with Op­po­si­tion con­cerns still loom­ing, par­tic­u­lar­ly over the way it was passed in the Low­er House last Fri­day.

“The way the Bill was passed shows that Prime Min­is­ter Kei­th Row­ley was right last Fri­day when he told the Op­po­si­tion Leader that day there was no dead­line for the Bill.

“But Gov­ern­ment knew this all along and their ap­proach on this made us waste a lot of time re­cent­ly when we could have com­plet­ed every­thing and passed the en­tire Bill,” Op­po­si­tion Sen­a­tor Sad­dam Ho­sein said yes­ter­day.

The Bill, which re­quired Op­po­si­tion votes, was passed last Fri­day af­ter weeks of con­tention be­tween Gov­ern­ment and Op­po­si­tion. Gov­ern­ment said the leg­is­la­tion was re­quired to meet Glob­al Fo­rum and Eu­ro­pean Union for­mats for tax in­for­ma­tion shar­ing and to meet a Caribbean Fi­nan­cial Ac­tion Task Force (CFATF) dead­line.

Gov­ern­ment amend­ed the Bill fol­low­ing Op­po­si­tion con­cerns, but the Op­po­si­tion main­tained its ob­jec­tion up to Fri­day’s fi­nal vote. The UNC in­sist­ed the Bill need­ed to be dis­cussed by a Par­lia­men­tary com­mit­tee along with two oth­er bills which were ini­tial­ly part of the pack­age.

With no Op­po­si­tion sup­port avail­able, Gov­ern­ment amend­ed the Bill to re­move the claus­es which re­quired a spe­cial ma­jor­i­ty vote.

How­ev­er, the Op­po­si­tion still did not sup­port it. The amend­ed bill was passed with a sim­ple ma­jor­i­ty.

Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert sub­se­quent­ly said the part that was passed in­volved claus­es nec­es­sary to meet the CFATF dead­line last Fri­day, or T&T would have been black­list­ed. He said the claus­es re­quired to meet the Glob­al Fo­rum tax in­for­ma­tion re­quire­ments were re­moved to al­low pas­sage. He said talks will be held with the Glob­al Fo­rum next year and he ex­pects the Bill to re­turn to Par­lia­ment ear­ly next year.

The Bill in its amend­ed form, mi­nus the spe­cial ma­jor­i­ty claus­es, will be de­bat­ed in the Sen­ate this af­ter­noon.

Ho­sein said Gov­ern­ment’s move to pull out the claus­es that re­quired spe­cial ma­jor­i­ty votes re­moved half of the rea­son for the bill “which shows they were wast­ing every­one’s time in the ap­proach they used, ob­fus­cat­ing the is­sues.

“If they had been straight all along and stopped de­lay­ing and bring­ing up all kinds of is­sues since June, try­ing to make the Op­po­si­tion look bad, we would have been able to prop­er­ly dis­cuss all the nec­es­sary Bills and pass every­thing in time for De­cem­ber 31, which was the Glob­al Fo­rum dead­line, rather than hav­ing this done piece­meal and have to go back to the Bill next year.

“In fact, what hap­pened to the Glob­al Fo­rum’s De­cem­ber 31 dead­line since those claus­es weren’t passed? Tim­ing and plan­ning wasn’t the Gov­ern­ment’s fo­cus on this oth­er than pol­i­tick­ing pur­pos­es.

“At least Gov­ern­ment boiled down to amend­ing parts of the Bill where we called for ju­di­cial over­sight for po­lice ac­cess­ing tax­pay­er in­for­ma­tion and po­lice pow­er can’t be abused, as Im­bert said last Fri­day, for a cuss case or fowl thief case,” Ho­sein said.


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