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Thursday, July 10, 2025

CNC3 panel divided on repealing TTRA

by

Andrea Perez-Sobers
18 days ago
20250620

Scrap­ping the T&T Rev­enue Au­thor­i­ty (TTRA) in sev­en weeks with­out deal­ing with the ma­jor is­sues with­in the pub­lic ser­vice was not the road to go down.

That’s ac­cord­ing to for­mer fi­nance min­is­ter Karen Nunez-Tesheira as she spoke dur­ing CNC3’s Mid-Year Bud­get Re­view pan­el dis­cus­sion last Wednes­day.

She ques­tioned the ur­gency of re­peal­ing the TTRA with­out deal­ing with the is­sues at the Board of In­land Rev­enue and Cus­toms.

“A ma­jor is­sue is the pub­lic ser­vice. We’ve been talk­ing about pub­lic ser­vice re­form since the de­ceased for­mer Min­is­ter of Pub­lic Ad­min­is­tra­tion Gor­don Drap­er’s time (2003). The is­sue with the pub­lic ser­vice is the se­cu­ri­ty of tenure. The pro­mo­tion, dis­ci­pline, mer­i­toc­ra­cy rather than se­nior­i­ty, all those fac­tors play in­to how the Rev­enue Au­thor­i­ty, the Board of In­land Rev­enue, as it is known, and Cus­toms have op­er­at­ed.”

“Drap­er did a re­port many years ago, iden­ti­fy­ing the in­ef­fi­cien­cies. These are dri­ven by hu­man na­ture. And so, I can’t see if you have not ad­dressed the pub­lic ser­vice is­sues and dealt with re­form in the pub­lic ser­vice, that putting these peo­ple back in­to the pub­lic ser­vice doesn’t seem to make sense,” Nunez-Tesh­e­ria point­ed out.

Nunez-Tesheira said when the TTRA mat­ter went to the Privy Coun­cil, La­dy Sim­ler held that since sec­tion 9 of the Con­sti­tu­tion was meant to pro­tect pub­lic of­fi­cers and the pub­lic from im­prop­er po­lit­i­cal pres­sure, any sep­a­rate statu­to­ry body had to be “gen­uine­ly in­de­pen­dent and not a de­vice or a sham,” and there must be ad­e­quate and ef­fec­tive safe­guards for work­ers to pro­tect them from po­lit­i­cal in­ter­fer­ence by the ex­ec­u­tive.

Nunez-Tesh­e­ria said La­dy Sim­ler was al­so sat­is­fied that there were enough checks and bal­ances built in­to the sys­tem that the ques­tion of ex­ec­u­tive over­reach and ex­ec­u­tive in­ter­fer­ence did not arise. That is why the con­sti­tu­tion­al pro­tec­tion of the ser­vice com­mis­sion ex­ist and she was sat­is­fied that there was no such threat.

“So giv­en the is­sue of the pub­lic ser­vice, giv­en the fact that she took a po­si­tion up to last year, I can­not see ra­tio­nal or shut­ting down the Rev­enue Au­thor­i­ty.”

Al­so speak­ing on the is­sue was Amer­i­can Cham­ber of T&T (Am­cham T&T) chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer Ni­rad Tewarie, who said the Cham­ber sup­port­ed the TTRA and thought it would pro­vide a bet­ter struc­ture in which to work.

“I’ve been around long enough, from a jour­nal­ist to be­ing in cham­bers for al­most two decades now, to know that the struc­ture isn’t as im­por­tant as the ex­e­cu­tion and the in­tent. The Cham­ber has been in meet­ings, fa­cil­i­tat­ed by the Min­istry of Fi­nance with the agency re­spon­si­ble for rev­enue col­lec­tion with­in the In­ter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund (IMF).

“They have said rev­enue au­thor­i­ties work, but so too do in­land rev­enue di­vi­sions that are prop­er­ly run. So the goal has to be to widen the tax net first, right. And by widen­ing the tax net, I mean, bring­ing more peo­ple in­to the tax net,” Tewarie out­lined.

He not­ed that Am­cham T&T has been sug­gest­ing to every min­is­ter who would lis­ten, that there is one sim­ple thing that they could do to start in­creas­ing rev­enue with­in a month. Tewarie said the Gov­ern­ment needs to take its own GIS da­ta, and such da­ta gen­er­at­ed by the pri­vate sec­tor. That would tell you where every­body and every­thing is lo­cat­ed from pro­fes­sion­al ser­vices peo­ple to small busi­ness­es to large busi­ness­es.

“Over­lay it, start with a re­gion, start with an elec­toral dis­trict if you want, be­cause that’s how our ge­o­graph­ic re­gions are. And, and over­lay it and see how many tax­pay­ers you have, and how many peo­ple are not in the tax net. What you do is start widen­ing the net. And you could do that in a non-puni­tive man­ner. You could say that we’re not go­ing af­ter you. If you come in with­in one year, we’re not go­ing af­ter you for back tax­es, if your tax­es are un­der a cer­tain thresh­old,” the cham­ber ex­ec­u­tive high­light­ed.

He said with this ap­proach, while the gov­ern­ment would not get to $10 bil­lion, there can be an in­crease of $1 bil­lion to $4 bil­lion in one year.

“It is about look­ing at where are the de­fi­cien­cies in the In­land Rev­enue. The de­ci­sion has been made, noth­ing we say here is go­ing to change it, as the de­ci­sion has been made. I be­lieve look at the in­ef­fi­cien­cies in the In­land Rev­enue Di­vi­sion. Make sure that they have enough peo­ple, the right tech­nol­o­gy, and the right man­dates and em­pow­er the peo­ple who are in po­si­tions of lead­er­ship to hold oth­ers ac­count­able,” he em­pha­sised.

Jump­ing in on the top­ic, econ­o­mist Dr Justin Ram in­di­cat­ed that he was nei­ther here nor there with how the gov­ern­ment goes about col­lect­ing the tax­es. What he is more con­cerned with is whether it’s easy to pay tax­es and whether the tax­es are be­ing paid ef­fi­cient­ly.

“What I would like to say to the Gov­ern­ment is try to im­prove the over­all lo­cal pro­duc­tion with­in this econ­o­my to im­port less and to per­haps ex­port more. What are the types of in­cen­tives that are re­quired there? I think we have to look at us­ing the fis­cal regime to en­cour­age in­vest­ment in pro­duc­tion and per­haps pe­nalise the con­sump­tion of fi­nal im­ports. I think that’s what we need to do,” Ram said. Speak­ing from Bar­ba­dos, Ram not­ed that there is a very low rate of cor­po­ra­tion tax in that coun­try.

“That means there’s very lit­tle in­cen­tive to try to avoid pay­ing tax­es. These are just some of the things that I think the gov­ern­ment needs to look at,” Ram ex­plained.

He sug­gest­ed that in­stead of fo­cussing on whether to abol­ish the TTRA or not, fo­cus more on how the gov­ern­ment can make pay­ing tax­es more ef­fi­cient and have a tax and fis­cal regime that is con­ducive to in­vest­ment and more lo­cal pro­duc­tion.

And econ­o­mist Am­ri­ta De­onar­ine not­ed that the mod­el pro­posed and passed with the now-re­pealed T&T Rev­enue Au­thor­i­ty was not so much a se­mi-au­tonomous rev­enue au­thor­i­ty, but rather a hy­brid mod­el.

“It was very much sim­i­lar to, I be­lieve, it’s the Es­to­nia mod­el of a rev­enue au­thor­i­ty. What end­ed up hap­pen­ing is that al­though the Board of In­land Rev­enue end­ed up be­ing delinked from the Pub­lic Ser­vice Com­mis­sion, we end­ed up in a sit­u­a­tion where the En­force­ment Di­vi­sion, which is where the Cus­toms and Ex­cise Di­vi­sion end­ed up in, was not delinked from the Pub­lic Ser­vice Com­mis­sion. Much of the find­ings of the Tax Ad­min­is­tra­tion Di­ag­nos­tic As­sess­ment Re­port by Caribbean Re­gion­al Tech­ni­cal As­sis­tance Cen­tre (CAR­TAC) would have point­ed out a lot of sys­tem­at­ic is­sues that were peo­ple-dri­ven,” De­onar­ine added.


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