The Pub­lic Ser­vices As­so­ci­a­tion (PSA) has failed in its sec­ond at­tempt to chal­lenge the move to im­ple­ment the long-tout­ed T&T Rev­enue Au­thor­i­ty (TTRA).

De­liv­er­ing a judg­ment, a short while ago, Ap­pel­late Judges Nolan Bereaux, Char­maine Pem­ber­ton, and Mi­ra Dean-Ar­mor­er dis­missed an ap­peal brought by PSA mem­ber and cus­toms of­fi­cer Ter­risa Dho­ray af­ter her case was re­ject­ed by High Court Judge West­min James in No­vem­ber, last year.

The ap­peal pan­el said: “We find no rea­son to de­part from the find­ings of the first in­stance judge.”

The out­come of the ap­peal was warm­ly re­ceived by Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert.

“The Court of Ap­peal just ruled unan­i­mous­ly that the T&T Rev­enue Act is valid and con­sti­tu­tion­al and does not breach the con­sti­tu­tion­al rights of pub­lic of­fi­cers,” Im­bert said in a post on X.

“We can now move swift­ly to im­prove and max­imise rev­enue col­lec­tion for the ben­e­fit of all our cit­i­zens,” he added.

In the law­suit, the PSA, through Dho­ray, chal­lenged the con­sti­tu­tion­al va­lid­i­ty of the leg­is­la­tion which seeks to re­place the Cus­toms and Ex­cise Di­vi­sion (CED) and the In­land Rev­enue Di­vi­sion (IRD) with the TTRA.

The law­suit specif­i­cal­ly fo­cused on Sec­tion 18 of the leg­is­la­tion which was pro­claimed by Pres­i­dent Chris­tine Kan­ga­loo on April 24, last year.

The sec­tion gives pub­lic ser­vants three months to make a de­ci­sion on their fu­ture em­ploy­ment up­on the op­er­a­tional­i­sa­tion of the TTRA.

Af­fect­ed pub­lic ser­vants have the choice to vol­un­tar­i­ly re­sign from the Pub­lic Ser­vice, ac­cept a trans­fer to the TTRA, or be trans­ferred to an­oth­er of­fice in the Pub­lic Ser­vice.

The im­ple­men­ta­tion was ini­tial­ly ex­pect­ed to take place in Au­gust but was de­ferred by Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert to De­cem­ber based on the case. It was sub­se­quent­ly de­ferred to March to fa­cil­i­tate the ap­peal.

Dho­ray’s lawyers con­tend cer­tain seg­ments of the leg­is­la­tion are un­con­sti­tu­tion­al as they seek to in­ter­fere with the terms and con­di­tions of em­ploy­ment of pub­lic ser­vants cur­rent­ly as­signed to the CED and IRD.

She al­so claimed that the Gov­ern­ment did not have the pow­er to del­e­gate its tax rev­enue col­lec­tion du­ties.

In its de­fence, the Gov­ern­ment has claimed that tax col­lec­tion could be del­e­gat­ed once guide­lines are pro­vid­ed by Par­lia­ment.

Jus­tice James dis­agreed with Dho­ray’s le­gal chal­lenge.

While he not­ed that tax­a­tion is a key source of a gov­ern­ment’s rev­enue and that the process of as­sess­ing and col­lect­ing tax­es is es­sen­tial, he not­ed that there were cur­rent­ly in­stances of pri­vate en­ti­ties be­ing able to col­lect tax­es on the gov­ern­ment’s be­half.

He al­so point­ed out that sev­er­al for­eign coun­tries have set up sim­i­lar spe­cial­ist bod­ies to deal with the “com­plex­i­ties” of mod­ern tax­a­tion.

Dho­ray was rep­re­sent­ed by Anand Ram­lo­gan, SC, Jayan­ti Lutch­me­di­al, Kent Sam­lal, Robert Ab­dool-Mitchell, Natasha Bis­ram, Vishaal Siewsaran and Ganesh Sa­roop.

The State was rep­re­sent­ed by Dou­glas Mendes, SC, Si­mon de la Bastide, and Leann Thomas.