Gail Alexan­der

Gov­ern­ment has set up a hot­line, 625-4VAT, for con­sumers to re­port how the VAT re­moval process is work­ing out, Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar said yes­ter­day. Per­sad-Bisses­sar con­firmed this yes­ter­day in a state­ment in Par­lia­ment. She said the hot­line (625-4828) will deal with queries on the VAT re­moval is­sue.

She said Gov­ern­ment had re­moved VAT on 7,000 plus items and the chal­lenge now was in mon­i­tor­ing the sit­u­a­tion to en­sure per­sons do not go out­side the law on the ze­ro-rat­ing is­sue. She said Le­gal Af­fairs Min­is­ter Prakash Ra­mad­har and the Prices Coun­cil have been charged with mon­i­tor­ing the sit­u­a­tion.

The PM said she is hap­py with the re­sponse to the sit­u­a­tion so far. But she said some is­sues had been re­port­ed in To­ba­go and Trade Min­is­ter Vas­ant Bharath and the two To­ba­go MPS will go to To­ba­go to iron out the is­sue and en­sure all of T&T ben­e­fits from ze­ro-rat­ed items.

She said VAT was an ar­ti­fi­cial in­crease on food meant as a rev­enue rais­ing mea­sure and the VAT?re­moval was a short term ini­tia­tive un­til the agri­cul­tur­al sec­tor got crack­ing. She al­so out­lined plans to stim­u­late the agri­cul­tur­al sec­tor. As a strat­e­gy in the longer term, she said Gov­ern­ment is con­sid­er­ing seek­ing from Cari­com re­moval of CET pay­ments from cus­toms du­ties on food items to fur­ther re­duce the cost of food.