Busi­ness mag­nate Arthur Lok Jack yes­ter­day called out Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert for crip­pling this coun­try’s man­u­fac­tur­ing sec­tor with its slow pace in pay­ing out­stand­ing Val­ue Added Tax (VAT) re­funds.

Speak­ing dur­ing the ques­tion-and-an­swer seg­ment of the T&T Man­u­fac­tur­ers’ As­so­ci­a­tion’s post-Bud­get me­dia dis­cus­sion at the Hy­att Re­gency Ho­tel in Port-of-Spain, Lok Jack said the Gov­ern­ment had done well with in­cen­tivis­ing man­u­fac­tur­ers to ex­port but at the same time was sti­fling their cash­flows with the de­lay in VAT re­funds.

Lok Jack said while he did not have many is­sues with Im­bert’s Bud­get pre­sen­ta­tion on Mon­day, he did have one ma­jor is­sue and that was the VAT re­funds.

“The main thing has been the VAT re­funds be­cause you en­cour­age us by putting all sorts of in­cen­tives to go in­to the ex­port mar­ket and when we go in­to the ex­port mar­ket, we are pay­ing VAT and we need to get those re­funds back be­cause, ba­si­cal­ly, we cost our ex­port prices with­out VAT but we pay the VAT,” Lok Jack said to ap­plause from the au­di­ence.

Lok Jack said this was a “tremen­dous blow” on the cash flow of man­u­fac­tur­ers.

Lok Jack is the chair­man of the As­so­ci­at­ed Brands In­dus­tries Lim­it­ed, which has six fac­to­ries in T&T.

“I think in my group alone, the Gov­ern­ment has over tens of mil­lions of dol­lars in VAT re­funds long time now out­stand­ing and we are not get­ting it back and this is mon­ey that we need that we don’t get and we have priced it in,” he said.

“And so, we have to use bank bor­row­ing with high in­ter­est rates et cetera to do that, so I think this is one of the things that you can cer­tain­ly work on to try and give us back these things.”

Lok Jack added, “You can­not in­cen­tivise us to get in­to ex­ports and pe­nalise us with VAT.”

Dur­ing his Bud­get pre­sen­ta­tion on Mon­day, Im­bert an­nounced that the Gov­ern­ment was able to pay out $4 bil­lion in VAT re­funds in 2022, which he said was sig­nif­i­cant­ly more than orig­i­nal­ly planned.

In her Bud­get re­sponse mean­while, TTMA pres­i­dent Tri­cia Coos­al al­so raised the is­sue of VAT re­funds.

“The as­so­ci­a­tion hopes the dis­burse­ment of VAT re­fund con­tin­ues rapid­ly in the com­ing fis­cal year since the SME sec­tor specif­i­cal­ly suf­fers sig­nif­i­cant­ly from cash flow when pay­ments are out­stand­ing. As a re­sult, TTMA looks for­ward to a con­tin­ued roll out for its mem­bers in a time­ly man­ner for fis­cal 2022-2023,” Coos­al stat­ed.

The San Juan Busi­ness As­so­ci­a­tion, in its Bud­get re­sponse, stat­ed that more at­ten­tion should have been paid to VAT re­turns, adding, “We ap­pre­ci­ate the $4B pay­out in 2022 but more still can be done.”