Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert brought a swift end to the con­tin­u­ous ex­ten­sions of waivers and penal­ties for com­pa­nies fail­ing to file an­nu­al re­turns and oth­er doc­u­ments.

The lat­est ex­ten­sion, which should have end­ed on Jan­u­ary 31, 2025, will now end on De­cem­ber 13, 2024. The last amnesty ex­pired on No­vem­ber 14, and ac­cord­ing to Im­bert, stake­hold­ers called for an ex­ten­sion to March 2025 or be­yond.

Speak­ing in the Low­er House yes­ter­day, Im­bert said the con­tin­u­ous ex­ten­sions would have jeop­ar­dised the coun­try’s stand­ing with in­ter­na­tion­al agen­cies, which could place the coun­try on a black­list.

“It is very, very im­por­tant that we do this to con­tin­ue our mis­sion to come off all of these in­ter­na­tion­al non-com­pli­ant lists,” Im­bert said. “I re­alise that with the pub­li­ca­tion of the ex­tend­ed dead­line of 31 Jan­u­ary and now a re­vised dead­line of 13 De­cem­ber, this may cause some in­con­ve­nience, but com­pa­nies have had months, I dare say years, to file their re­turns, and I hope peo­ple un­der­stand how im­por­tant it is, how frag­ile our sit­u­a­tion is in terms of our com­pli­ance with all of these in­ter­na­tion­al agen­cies, and now we have there­fore giv­en an ad­di­tion­al month rather than giv­ing an ad­di­tion­al two months.”

Im­bert was speak­ing dur­ing the de­bate for An Act to Amend the Pro­ceeds of Crime Act, An­ti-Ter­ror­ism Act, Fi­nan­cial In­tel­li­gence Unit of Trinidad and To­ba­go Act, Se­cu­ri­ties Act, In­sur­ance Act, Non-Prof­it Or­gan­i­sa­tions Act, Civ­il As­set Re­cov­ery and Man­age­ment and Un­ex­plained Wealth Act, and Mis­cel­la­neous Pro­vi­sions (FATF Com­pli­ance) Act.

Ac­cord­ing to Im­bert, the bill aims to amend key leg­is­la­tion, in­clud­ing the Pro­ceeds of Crime Act, An­ti-Ter­ror­ism Act, and oth­ers, to align Trinidad and To­ba­go with in­ter­na­tion­al stan­dards set by the Fi­nan­cial Ac­tion Task Force (FATF) and the Eu­ro­pean Union.

The bill in­tro­duces ad­min­is­tra­tive mon­e­tary fines to en­sure more ef­fi­cient en­force­ment, en­hances over­sight mech­a­nisms for fi­nan­cial and non-fi­nan­cial sec­tors, and ad­dress­es de­fi­cien­cies iden­ti­fied in pre­vi­ous eval­u­a­tions. Im­bert said that once passed, the coun­try will join the ranks of com­pli­ant ju­ris­dic­tions.

“Now, it is not just a le­gal oblig­a­tion. We con­sid­er it es­sen­tial for safe­guard­ing our fi­nan­cial sys­tem from mis­use and for avoid­ing se­vere penal­ties. A re­cent ex­am­ple of this is seen in the case of the US fi­nan­cial crime and avoid­ance,” Im­bert said.

“The rea­son why I’m say­ing this is that we live in a world where we can­not ig­nore the fact that these or­gan­i­sa­tions ex­ist. So we can­not ig­nore the fact that the Fi­nan­cial Ac­tion Task Force ex­ists or that the Glob­al Fo­rum, which is an en­ti­ty with­in the OECD that looks at tax com­pli­ance and tax trans­paren­cy, we can­not pre­tend it does not ex­ist. We can­not pre­tend that the EU Coun­cil of Min­is­ters that look at coun­tries around the world and de­ter­mines whether they are com­pli­ant with the shar­ing of tax in­for­ma­tion, we can’t pre­tend they don’t ex­ist.”

Im­bert trav­elled to Brus­sels last week to meet with of­fi­cials re­spon­si­ble for as­sess­ing this coun­try’s com­pli­ance with tax in­for­ma­tion trans­paren­cy.

Dur­ing this meet­ing, Min­is­ter Im­bert said EU di­rec­tors told him even though he had signed the con­ven­tion in Paris, they stressed T&T must now rat­i­fy the con­ven­tion.

“The EU made it clear that it’s all very well for us to pass laws, for me to sign an agree­ment; I have to rat­i­fy it,” Im­bert ex­plained. He said “to bring it in­to ef­fect, to in­cor­po­rate it in­to our do­mes­tic le­gal frame­work,” some of that was done ear­li­er in the year.