DA­REECE PO­LO

Se­nior Re­porter

da­reece.po­lo@guardian.co.tt

For­mer fi­nance min­is­ter Colm Im­bert yes­ter­day ad­dressed con­cerns over the where­abouts of $135.6 mil­lion in prop­er­ty tax­es col­lect­ed by the State, dis­miss­ing the ques­tions sur­round­ing the funds as sense­less.

Im­bert was re­spond­ing to Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar, who de­mand­ed that the pre­vi­ous ad­min­is­tra­tion ac­count for pay­ments made by more than 132,000 home­own­ers be­tween Feb­ru­ary 2024 and May 2025.

How­ev­er, Im­bert ex­plained that the sys­tem was de­signed so that these funds would be de­posit­ed di­rect­ly in­to the Con­sol­i­dat­ed Fund—where the State col­lects all rev­enues and oth­er monies raised or re­ceived by the Gov­ern­ment—un­til such time as lo­cal gov­ern­ment cor­po­ra­tions could col­lect the tax them­selves.

“That ques­tion didn’t make any sense. The mon­ey went in­to the Con­sol­i­dat­ed Fund. That’s pub­lic knowl­edge. It was not col­lect­ed by the lo­cal gov­ern­ment cor­po­ra­tions. The way the sys­tem was de­signed, the mon­ey would go in­to the Con­sol­i­dat­ed Fund and if you look at the bud­get es­ti­mates you will see that.”

“And when the cor­po­ra­tions were ready to come col­lect the tax in terms of hav­ing all of the in­fra­struc­ture nec­es­sary, which is quite com­pre­hen­sive—you need a vault, you need a cashier’s cage, you need se­cu­ri­ty for cash in tran­sit, you need in­ter­nal au­dit, it’s quite com­plex—when they were ready then the law was amend­ed to al­low the Min­is­ter of Fi­nance to au­tho­rise the cor­po­ra­tion to col­lect prop­er­ty tax. So, no cor­po­ra­tion, in­clud­ing all sev­en UNC cor­po­ra­tions, ever col­lect­ed prop­er­ty tax. It was all col­lect­ed by the trea­sury and went in­to the Con­sol­i­dat­ed Fund.”

He added that there is an al­lo­ca­tion for prop­er­ty tax with­in the lo­cal gov­ern­ment cor­po­ra­tions’ port­fo­lio.

At Thurs­day’s post-Cab­i­net me­dia con­fer­ence, Per­sad-Bisses­sar al­leged that “the last gov­ern­ment has spent out the mon­ey they col­lect­ed” from prop­er­ty tax.

She fur­ther de­mand­ed ac­count­abil­i­ty from for­mer lo­cal gov­ern­ment min­is­ter Faris Al-Rawi and the wider gov­ern­ment.