Sascha Wil­son

The dead­line for the sub­mis­sion of Prop­er­ty Tax Eval­u­a­tion Re­turn Forms has been fur­ther ex­tend­ed to Feb­ru­ary 28.

The an­nounce­ment was made on Mon­day through a pub­lic no­tice by the Min­istry of Fi­nance Val­u­a­tion Di­vi­sion on the day of the dead­line.

It stat­ed tat the de­ci­sion was tak­en in recog­ni­tion of dif­fi­cul­ties that some prop­er­ty own­ers may have ex­pe­ri­enced in ob­tain­ing the re­quired doc­u­ments in the con­text of COVID-19 re­stric­tions.

Every per­son in pos­ses­sion of res­i­den­tial land, com­mer­cial land and agri­cul­tur­al land or a com­bi­na­tion of the afore­men­tioned (mixed use) with or with­out build­ings in T&T are re­quired to sub­mit the forms.

The pub­lic was re­mind­ed that fail­ure to com­ply with this re­quire­ment con­sti­tutes a crim­i­nal of­fence which is pun­ish­able by a $5,000 fine.

How­ev­er, be­fore the an­nounce­ment was made sev­er­al prop­er­ty own­ers were at the min­istry’s Val­u­a­tion Di­vi­sion Of­fice at Palms Club Build­ing in San Fer­nan­do mak­ing their last min­utes sub­mis­sions.

One man told Guardian Me­dia that he did not want to sub­mit the forms. “We wasn’t sure why the Gov­ern­ment want­ed to do some­thing so so cru­el as this and peo­ple are just scared of be­ing charged a $5000 penal­ty. To do this af­ter you ac­tu­al­ly pay a big mort­gage to own a prop­er­ty you had to come here now to line up and con­tin­ue pay this kind of mon­ey be­cause all this Gov­ern­ment is con­cerned about is tax­ing you in­to pover­ty.”

He re­called that in 2017 he had sub­mit­ted his val­u­a­tion re­turn forms and of­fi­cials came to his home and draft­ed a sketch of his house.

“So what hap­pen from 2017 to now if you did more ren­o­va­tions in your house and all these kinds of things? Now you have to pay more mon­ey again?” he lament­ed.

An­oth­er woman ad­mit­ted she was afraid of be­ing fined. “Yes I came be­cause I don’t want to have to pay $5,000 and I mean we have to do what we have to do so that is my take on this whole sit­u­a­tion,” she said.

Two oth­er women said they could not sub­mit the forms be­fore be­cause they were not well.

On No­vem­ber 29, 2021, the min­istry had sent out a pub­lic no­tice that the ini­tial No­vem­ber 30 dead­line was ex­tend­ed to Jan­u­ary 31.

Days be­fore this an­nounce­ment, Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert had said then in an­swer to an ur­gent ques­tion in Par­lia­ment that they had not re­ceived the re­quired 200,000 val­u­a­tion re­turn forms need­ed to pro­ceed with the im­ple­men­ta­tion of prop­er­ty tax.

He said the to­tal num­ber of re­turns for res­i­den­tial prop­er­ties at that time was 165,000.

At­tempts to reach Im­bert and the Min­is­ter in the Min­istry of Fi­nance Bri­an Man­ning were un­suc­cess­ful.