Gail Alexan­der

The “dou­ble-dip­ping” which oc­curred among some Salary Re­lief Grant ap­pli­cants shows that peo­ple are “a bit des­per­ate.”

Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert ac­knowl­edged this at yes­ter­day’s first post-Cab­i­net me­dia brief­ing for the Gov­ern­ment’s new term.

And he’s warned that the for­mu­la­tion of the up­com­ing 2021 Bud­get is some­thing of a Catch 22 mat­ter be­cause of two sets of calls com­ing from com­men­ta­tors.

Im­bert said the “dou­ble-dip­ping” which had been found among some Salary Re­lief Grant ap­pli­cants wasn’t un­ex­pect­ed.

“You have to un­der­stand peo­ple are a bit des­per­ate here, you have to have a hu­man side in all of this,” he said, not­ing the min­istry’s Cen­tral Au­dit Unit did a re­port on the sit­u­a­tion.

The life of the Salary Grant Unit will be ex­tend­ed to year’s end to deal with the back­log of peo­ple who ap­plied but didn’t qual­i­fy be­cause they didn’t put all the in­for­ma­tion need­ed. Gen­uine cas­es would be processed, “but it’s a labou­ri­ous task.”

He ad­mit­ted there would have been some hu­man er­ror and some ap­pli­ca­tions may have fall­en through the cracks and not have been dealt with ap­pro­pri­ate­ly. He, how­ev­er, said a re­port on peo­ple not be­ing paid - which the min­istry checked - was wrong. Among the three peo­ple in it, he said one got the grant, one nev­er ap­plied and an­oth­er got a grant from So­cial De­vel­op­ment.

Im­bert al­so gave a re­minder about the Sep­tem­ber 28 fo­rum which Gov­ern­ment hosts on the Bud­get and the econ­o­my. De­tails will be giv­en on T&T’s fi­nances he said, in­clud­ing the ef­fect of the COVID pan­dem­ic on T&T’s rev­enues and ex­pen­di­ture.

“It’s in­tend­ed to let the pub­lic know what ex­act­ly is hap­pen­ing with T&T’s in­come and ex­pen­di­ture in the last year. We’ll al­so take a very, very brief look in­to what we’re look­ing at for the next five years,” Im­bert added.

Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley will be among the 80 pub­lic and pri­vate par­tic­i­pants, plus 300 oth­ers via vir­tu­al sys­tems. The Hy­att Re­gency ball­room will utilised with a so­cial dis­tanced spaced set­ting.

Im­bert said so far, es­ti­mates for the Bud­get deficit are still in the vicin­i­ty of the $15 bil­lion giv­en ear­li­er in the year, “… Un­til the pub­lic ser­vants do the fi­nal num­bers, that’s the kind of fig­ure we’re look­ing at.”

He said there had been sig­nif­i­cant re­duc­tion in tax rev­enues of var­i­ous kinds, in­clud­ing due to de­pressed oil prices.

Im­bert said it was al­so no se­cret that Gov­ern­ment would im­ple­ment the prop­er­ty tax and launch the Rev­enue Au­thor­i­ty since this was stat­ed in Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment’s elec­tion man­i­festo.

“We didn’t hide that, we said we’d do eval­u­a­tion of prop­er­ties and fill the rolls (on prop­er­ties) to im­ple­ment the tax.”

On whether it will be a chal­lenge for peo­ple to pay, he said the over­all sit­u­a­tion was a com­plex Catch 22 one. He not­ed one group of com­men­ta­tors are call­ing for Gov­ern­ment to bal­ance the Bud­get and cut and an­oth­er warned against bor­row­ing, in­clud­ing from the Her­itage and Sta­bil­i­sa­tion Fund

“How on earth is one ex­pect­ed to deal with these two sets of calls?” he added.

Im­bert said if Gov­ern­ment did what one set was rec­om­mend­ing, about $15 bil­lion will have to to be cut from T&T’s ex­pen­di­ture and that could im­pact ex­pen­di­ture that has to be done for pen­sions, so­cial wel­fare, dis­abil­i­ty pay­ments and debt. He said that was $3.5 bil­lion month­ly.

If Gov­ern­ment cut ex­pen­di­ture to $35 bil­lion as some pro­posed, T&T would de­scend in­to chaos, he added. And if tax­es were stopped, he queried where that rev­enue would come from.

“So it’s easy for com­men­ta­tors to say ‘cut’ but it’s not easy to do ... all over the world coun­tries are strug­gling, Dubai al­so, so you can’t just do what peo­ple are ask­ing you to do just like that, we have to be very very care­ful,” Im­bert said.

Im­bert said he hadn’t ex­pect­ed NATUC at the Bud­get fo­rum. NATUC’s has again de­clined to at­tend the event. He said he didn’t re­al­ly think peo­ple who were in ac­tive pol­i­tics con­test­ing against the PNM would have been favourably dis­posed to Gov­ern­ment.

“But we’ve got­ten tremen­dous feed­back on rec­om­men­da­tions from pri­vate sec­tor, NGOS, JTUM, oth­er unions, busi­ness groups, etc … al­most 45 pages of bul­let points.”