An­drea Perez-Sobers

Se­nior Re­porter

an­drea.perez-sobers@guardian.co.tt

Con­fed­er­a­tion of Re­gion­al Busi­ness Cham­bers (CR­BC) pres­i­dent Vivek Char­ran is call­ing on the gov­ern­ment to ex­tend the dead­line for the col­lec­tion of prop­er­ty tax.

He said that giv­en the nu­mer­ous is­sues fac­ing the roll­out of the tax the ex­ten­sion of the dead­line should be con­sid­ered. Char­ran said among the is­sues are that sev­er­al peo­ple have not re­ceived their up­dat­ed no­tices as well as lim­it­ed pay­ment dates and op­tions avail­able to the pub­lic,

“They are al­so placed in a po­si­tion where they are un­der pres­sure to seek out the pay­ment of the tax be­fore the dead­line. I don't be­lieve that if the Gov­ern­ment ex­tends the dead­line past Sep­tem­ber 30, it will harm it in any form or fash­ion, con­sid­er­ing that they can see how prob­lem­at­ic the pay­ment of the tax­es is at this par­tic­u­lar point in time,” Char­ran stressed.

He said an­oth­er prob­lem is that af­ter last Thurs­day, Linx ma­chines were not be­ing ac­cept­ed as a means of pay­ment and that is a hin­drance.

“We keep hear­ing that the Gov­ern­ment has in­vest­ed a lot of mon­ey, tax­pay­ers' mon­ey, in­to dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion. Yet where are we see­ing dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion be­ing used in an ef­fi­cient way to aid pay­ments, par­tic­u­lar­ly when you know there's all this talk about go­ing cash­less and so on? Yet Linx trans­ac­tions are no longer al­lowed to pay your prop­er­ty tax,” Char­ran lament­ed.

He in­di­cat­ed that many peo­ple use Linx and cut­ting off this ac­cess was not a good idea.

“The process of col­lect­ing the tax has not been thor­ough­ly fleshed out...The pay­ment of the tax should have been or­gan­ised as ef­fi­cient­ly as pos­si­ble, mak­ing it easy for every­one to pay," he dis­closed.

In ad­di­tion, Char­ran said many peo­ple are pan­ick­ing sim­ply be­cause of the harsh penal­ties that are as­so­ci­at­ed with the non­pay­ment of the tax and many peo­ple have queried the first val­u­a­tion and have yet to be reeval­u­at­ed or got­ten a let­ter of reval­u­a­tion.

The Guardian tried sev­er­al times to con­tact and al­so What­sapp Min­is­ter of Dig­i­tal Trans­for­ma­tion Has­sel Bac­chus on why Gov­PayTT is not be­ing used to ex­pe­dite the pay­ment of prop­er­ty tax, but there was no im­me­di­ate re­sponse from him.

CHIEF ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer of the T&T In­ter­na­tion­al Fi­nan­cial Cen­tre (TTIFC) John Out­ridge was al­so not reach­able.

IGovTT said it could not re­spond on this mat­ter, as the prop­er­ty tax ini­tia­tive is with­in the re­mit of the Min­istry of Fi­nance.