Gail Alexan­der

The Fi­nance Min­istry yes­ter­day con­firmed that le­gal or­ders have been done for the re­moval of tax­es on lap­tops and sim­i­lar items —and the re­moval was ef­fec­tive from last Fri­day.

This af­ter con­sumers were be­ing told by Cus­toms and Ex­cise up to yes­ter­day that no le­gal or­der was in place to fa­cil­i­tate the re­moval of tax­es on the de­vices.

The min­istry, how­ev­er, clar­i­fied the sit­u­a­tion. Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert has al­so said that re­funds will be made on VAT or On­line Pur­chase Tax on these items that may have been in­ad­ver­tent­ly charged by the Cus­toms & Ex­cise Di­vi­sion as a re­sult of a man­u­al en­try by an im­porter or an elec­tron­ic en­try that was al­ready in the ASY­CU­DA sys­tem pri­or to last Fri­day, but not yet im­port­ed as of that date.

It ap­pears there was some “lag­way” be­tween Im­bert’s an­nounce­ment on the is­sue and word to the rel­e­vant agen­cies on the nec­es­sary le­gal no­tices.

Last Fri­day, Im­bert promised that VAT and OPT tax­es would be re­moved from lap­tops, note­book com­put­ers and tablet com­put­ers. There had been calls for re­moval of the tax­es af­ter

Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter Nyan Gads­by-Dol­ly re­vealed that 65,000 stu­dents may not have prop­er ac­cess to on­line learn­ing be­cause of lack of con­nec­tiv­i­ty or de­vices.

Al­though Im­bert had an­nounced the re­moval was ef­fec­tive last Fri­day, yes­ter­day the T&T Guardian was shown a let­ter dat­ed Sep­tem­ber 8 which a lo­cal busi­ness ser­vice re­ceived from Cus­toms on the tax re­moval.

The let­ter stat­ed that the re­moval would re­quire a le­gal no­tice which would have to go through the Trade Min­istry first and af­ter to Cus­toms’ le­gal de­part­ment and then the ASY­CU­DA di­vi­sion be­fore items could be clas­si­fied with­out the tax­es.

The Cus­toms let­ter stat­ed the steps have to be com­plet­ed they hadn’t yet con­firmed whether they had re­ceived the man­date. As a re­sult, Cus­toms stat­ed it was con­tin­u­ing to im­pose the cur­rent tax­es un­til fur­ther no­tice. Up to then, Cus­toms not­ed there was no le­gal no­tice on Gov­ern­ment’s web­site on the is­sue.

How­ev­er, yes­ter­day af­ter­noon Im­bert’s min­istry is­sued a me­dia re­lease stress­ing that the waiv­er of VAT and OPT on the lap­tops and the re­lat­ed items is ef­fec­tive from last Fri­day.

The re­lease said Im­bert had not­ed in­for­ma­tion in the pub­lic do­main and want­ed to con­firm that the re­quired le­gal or­ders for the tax re­movals “have been signed by the Min­is­ter of Fi­nance and the Sec­re­tary to the Cab­i­net, re­spec­tive­ly, and are ef­fec­tive from Fri­day Sep­tem­ber 4, 2020.”