Kevon Felmine

Busi­ness­es which fail to ad­just their prices to Gov­ern­ment's new 12.5 per cent Val­ue Added Tax (VAT) are run­ning afoul of the VAT Act and ac­cord­ing to Trade and In­dus­try Min­is­ter Paula Gopee-Scoon, the Board of In­land Rev­enue (BIR) can in­sti­tute le­gal ac­tion against them.

Since the new VAT regime kicked in on Feb­ru­ary 1, the Con­sumer Af­fairs Di­vi­sion has re­ceived many re­ports of su­per­mar­kets, stores and hard­wares' neg­li­gence in ad­just­ing their prices, es­pe­cial­ly de­creas­ing the cost of items from 15 per cent to 12.5 per cent.

Gopee-Scoon told re­porters on Wednes­day, the Con­sumer Af­fairs Di­vi­sion was li­ais­ing di­rect­ly with busi­ness­es to as­sist with price ad­just­ments as they were in a tran­si­tion­al pe­ri­od.

While there was no time frame for busi­ness­es to get their acts in or­der, she said the pow­er was re­al­ly in the hands of con­sumers.

How­ev­er, she said le­gal ac­tion would have to be ini­ti­at­ed by the Board of In­land Rev­enue (BIR) which is guid­ed by the VAT Act.

"There is no par­tic­u­lar time frame but I will tell you some­thing, when busi­ness per­sons con­tra­vene the VAT Act, they are crim­i­nal­ly li­able and I am sure that the Board of In­land Rev­enue will do what it has to do.

"They are the ones with the re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for the VAT Act so the Board of In­land Rev­enue and the Min­istry of Fi­nance will do what they have to do as it is a crim­i­nal of­fence.

"It is not for Con­sumer Af­fairs to do that. We are the ones who have a re­la­tion­ship with the con­sumers in terms of in­for­ma­tion," Gopee-Scoon said.

Some busi­ness have al­ready made the ad­just­ments. A check at Stan­dard Dis­trib­u­tors showed odd look­ing prices on fur­ni­ture and ap­pli­ances and store work­ers said it was be­cause of the 2.5 per cent re­duc­tion of prices.

Mean­while, Su­per­Pharm em­ploy­ees said since Jan­u­ary month-end, they worked ex­tra hours to get the prices ad­just­ed.

On Wednes­day, the Min­istry of Trade and In­dus­try pub­lished a list of items that re­main ze­ro-rat­ed items that were pre­vi­ous­ly ze­ro-rat­ed and are now sub­ject­ed to 12.5 per cent and the prices most fre­quent­ly used by su­per­mar­kets that were as­cer­tained in a Con­sumer Af­fairs Di­vi­sion sur­vey.

Gopee-Scoon said a list of hard­ware items would be pub­lished in the dai­ly news­pa­pers next week to show prices un­der the new VAT regime.

She is al­so ex­pect­ed to host a press con­fer­ence to­day to ex­plained the oth­er roles the Con­sumer Af­fairs Di­vi­sion would adopt go­ing for­ward.