The T&T Cham­ber of In­dus­try and Com­merce is "whol­ly dis­sat­is­fied" that Gov­ern­ment is seek­ing an ex­ten­sion of the Sep­tem­ber 30 dead­line for leg­is­la­tion re­lat­ed to the For­eign Ac­count Tax Com­pli­ance Act (FAT­CA).

In a me­dia state­ment, the busi­ness group said while strin­gent scruti­ny of the Bill at the lev­el of a Joint Se­lect Com­mit­tee is ap­pre­ci­at­ed, the mat­ter should not have reached that point.

"The busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty and, by ex­ten­sion, the pop­u­la­tion ap­pears to be caught in the mid­dle of this predica­ment, and re­jects any at­tempt at what might well be po­lit­i­cal joust­ing on the part of our re­spec­tive lead­ers. We there­fore call up­on the pow­ers that be to act re­spon­si­bly and with dis­patch," the Cham­ber said.

"The crit­i­cal im­por­tance of FAT­CA and its di­rect im­pact on Trinidad and To­ba­go's bank­ing and fi­nan­cial sys­tems has been ven­ti­lat­ed time and again by the T&T Cham­ber, and by sev­er­al oth­er lo­cal spe­cial in­ter­est groups, in­clud­ing the Bankers As­so­ci­a­tion of TT. The im­me­di­ate im­pli­ca­tions of non-com­pli­ance are se­ri­ous and far-reach­ing; among them, the dis­rup­tion or ter­mi­na­tion al­to­geth­er of bank­ing re­la­tion­ships be­tween busi­ness­es, fi­nan­cial ser­vice providers and non-com­pli­ant in­di­vid­u­als."

The group fur­ther warned that US cor­re­spon­dent bank­ing ser­vices such as wire trans­ac­tions and cur­ren­cy trans­fer trans­ac­tions will be dis­rupt­ed or ter­mi­nat­ed, lead­ing to a pos­si­ble over­all in­crease in the cost of do­ing busi­ness.

The state­ment con­tin­ued: "Par­tic­u­lar­ly in a time of eco­nom­ic de­cline, few­er things can be more dam­ag­ing than an erod­ed coun­try im­age that crip­ples eco­nom­ic growth. Fail­ure to com­ply with leg­is­la­tion can lead to such a sit­u­a­tion, neg­a­tive­ly im­pact­ing up­on whether or not Trinidad and To­ba­go re­mains at­trac­tive to for­eign in­vest­ment and open for busi­ness.

The Bankers As­so­ci­a­tion of T&T (BATT) said it is sup­port­ing the pas­sage of the Tax In­for­ma­tion Ex­change Bill, 2016, be­cause it will en­able T&T to so­lid­i­fy its In­ter Gov­ern­men­tal Agree­ment with the Unit­ed States.

"This Act will pro­vide the frame­work for fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tions to com­ply with both the US For­eign Tax Com­pli­ance Act (FAT­CA) as well as Trinidad and To­ba­go law by re­port­ing to our Board of In­land Rev­enue (BIR) on the per­son­al and fi­nan­cial in­for­ma­tion of US per­sons who are sub­ject to US tax laws," BATT said in a state­ment.

"The pur­pose of shar­ing that in­for­ma­tion with the BIR is for on­ward trans­mis­sion to the In­ter­nal Rev­enue Ser­vice (IRS) who is the des­ig­nat­ed tax au­thor­i­ty in the Unit­ed States. US tax law re­quires that US per­sons re­port on their world­wide in­come and there­fore the shar­ing of this in­for­ma­tion with our lo­cal tax au­thor­i­ty is in sup­port of US per­sons' re­port­ing oblig­a­tions."

BATT said it is com­mit­ted to sup­port­ing this process for im­ple­men­ta­tion of the coun­try's FAT­CA oblig­a­tions and will con­tin­ue to work with the rel­e­vant au­thor­i­ties to en­sure the ap­pro­pri­ate leg­is­la­tion is passed.