The Gov­ern­ment of T&T's fi­nan­cial year end is 15 days away. It co­in­cides with the prop­er­ty tax pay­ment date dead­line.

De­mand for cashier time for PAYE, Green Fund Levy, and quar­ter­ly tax would nor­mal­ly be high at this time. Adding prop­er­ty tax pay­ments to 400,000 hered­i­ta­ments com­pounds this de­mand.

As a re­sult, we are see­ing long queues at many GORTT rev­enue of­fices. Though not new, prop­er­ty tax has led to ap­pre­hen­sion re­gard­ing the penal­ties for the non-pay­ment.

Not every­one has re­ceived as­sess­ment no­tices or the rel­e­vant in­voice. This has led to some con­fu­sion amongst tax­pay­ers anx­ious to avoid the penal­ties and the ad­min­is­tra­tive hor­ror sto­ries. In one case, a res­i­den­tial prop­er­ty joint­ly owned by a hus­band and wife has even led to two in­di­vid­ual as­sess­ments, with two dif­fer­ent as­sess­ment amounts for the same prop­er­ty. We can as­sume this was an anom­aly. How many oth­ers are there like it?

Bar­ring these sna­fus, the Fi­nance Min­istry and In­land Rev­enue ought to have made it pos­si­ble to pay tax­es elec­tron­i­cal­ly, in per­son and on­line. Giv­en the stat­ed in­ten­tion to dig­i­talise gov­ern­ment busi­ness, why were there no on­line pay­ment op­tions?

The GORTT had enough time to pre­pare for this de­vel­op­ment, yet it has patent­ly failed to do so. Why not? Why were there signs that in­di­cat­ed that LINX trans­ac­tions would not be ac­com­mo­dat­ed be­tween Sep­tem­ber 12 and 30 be­cause of the end of the fi­nan­cial year? Why does the fi­nan­cial year end make elec­tron­ic pay­ments dif­fi­cult?

In the mid-year Bud­get Re­view, the Fi­nance Min­is­ter es­ti­mat­ed that the fi­nan­cial out­turn would be a deficit of $9 bil­lion. The Cen­tral Bank’s Ju­ly 2024 eco­nom­ic bul­letin said de­clines in both in­ter­na­tion­al com­mod­i­ty prices and do­mes­tic en­er­gy pro­duc­tion re­sult­ed in a deficit of $4.3 bil­lion on the cen­tral gov­ern­ment ac­counts for the first nine of the fis­cal year 2023/24.

Re­spond­ing to com­plaints that re­pairs to some schools were not com­plet­ed dur­ing the sum­mer va­ca­tion, the Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter said the prob­lem was mon­ey.

Al­so, the Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter con­firmed this week that the Coast Guard’s fleet of eight large pa­trol ves­sels (six built in the Nether­lands and two by the Aus­tralian ship­ping group) is cur­rent­ly non-func­tion­al. He ad­vanced no ex­pla­na­tion wor­thy of rep­e­ti­tion.

Sched­uled main­te­nance for ma­jor pieces of equip­ment is a rou­tine man­age­ment func­tion in any pro­tec­tive ser­vice. That all the ma­jor ves­sels are down si­mul­ta­ne­ous­ly, leav­ing the na­tion­al bor­ders un­pro­tect­ed, is a gross dere­lic­tion of du­ty or a tac­it ad­mis­sion that there was no bud­get for re­pairs.

How ex­tra­or­di­nary, but rem­i­nis­cent of the main­te­nance is­sues with the he­li­copters!

There­fore, mak­ing the tax col­lec­tion process easy, ef­fi­cient, and quick to en­cour­age com­pli­ance should be a key ob­jec­tive of the Fi­nance Min­istry. The Gov­ern­ment needs the mon­ey.

All elec­tron­ic pay­ment mech­a­nisms should be de­ployed to en­sure that the Gov­ern­ment col­lects what is due every day, to­day and hence­for­ward, not next year as promised by the Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment Min­is­ter.

Giv­en the fore­go­ing, the Fi­nance Min­is­ter must ful­fil his re­spon­si­bil­i­ty to the coun­try by end­ing the im­passe with the Au­di­tor Gen­er­al’s Of­fice.

He must make every ef­fort to pro­vide the pri­ma­ry doc­u­men­tary ev­i­dence to al­low the Au­di­tor Gen­er­al to con­firm that all gov­ern­ment rev­enue is ful­ly ac­count­ed for and in­clud­ed in the pub­lic ac­counts for 2023.

We do not want to re­peat the neg­a­tives of the 2023 year-end au­dit ex­er­cise in 2024.