T&T, we have a prob­lem.

We are not mak­ing near­ly enough mon­ey to pay our bills.

In fact, we made al­most $2 bil­lion less than we ex­pect­ed to make by the end of Jan­u­ary.

And if the trend con­tin­ues, we may lose up to $5 bil­lion in rev­enue for fis­cal 2021. This fig­ure does not in­clude the ex­pect­ed $5 bil­lion short­fall al­ready pre­dict­ed for fis­cal 2021.

This was the sober­ing in­for­ma­tion re­vealed by Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert yes­ter­day dur­ing a vir­tu­al press con­fer­ence to up­date the coun­try on the “Ac­tu­al Fis­cal Out­turn for Trinidad And To­ba­go for the first four months of Fis­cal 2021.”

Im­bert said the of­fi­cial bud­get es­ti­mate of rev­enue for the pe­ri­od Oc­to­ber 1, 2020 to Jan­u­ary 31, 2021, which rep­re­sents the first four months of the fis­cal year, was $13.823 bil­lion.

“How­ev­er, pri­mar­i­ly as a re­sult of the ad­verse ef­fects of the pan­dem­ic, the ac­tu­al rev­enue col­lec­tion for this four-month pe­ri­od was $12.020 bil­lion, a neg­a­tive vari­ance of $1.803 bil­lion, or 13 per cent less than the es­ti­mates,” he stat­ed.

Im­bert said the short­fall in rev­enue oc­curred in sev­er­al ar­eas in­clud­ing tax­es on In­come and Prof­its which was down by $436 mil­lion com­pared with es­ti­mates.

A sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of that short­fall was as a re­sult of the de­crease in tax rev­enue re­ceived from oil and gas com­pa­nies which was a di­rect re­sult, he said, of de­pressed prices for oil and gas and low­er than ex­pect­ed pro­duc­tion vol­umes.

In ad­di­tion to this, non-tax rev­enue dropped by $1.430 bil­lion or 35 per cent of what was ex­pect­ed, Im­bert said.

“The ef­fect of all this is that the Gov­ern­ment has been se­ri­ous­ly chal­lenged in the first four months of the fi­nan­cial year to find the mon­ey nec­es­sary to keep the coun­try run­ning and to meet manda­to­ry com­mit­ments and has had to re­sort to loan fi­nanc­ing and with­drawals from the Her­itage and Sta­bil­i­sa­tion Fund, to make up the deficit be­tween in­come and ex­pen­di­ture,” Im­bert said.

“We have so far bor­rowed $3 bil­lion for di­rect bud­getary sup­port and with­drawn the equiv­a­lent of a fur­ther $2 bil­lion from the Her­itage and Sta­bi­liza­tion Fund, sim­ply to pay salaries and wages and pen­sions and keep our health sec­tor func­tion­ing in the face of the de­mands of COVID-19,” he said.

De­spite the fi­nan­cial con­straints, Im­bert said the pay­ment of salaries and wages for the ap­prox­i­mate­ly 90,000 work­ers in the pub­lic sec­tor has been the “top pri­or­i­ty”.

Im­bert said the “manda­to­ry pay­ments” cost the coun­try a “stag­ger­ing $3.5 bil­lion per month, each and every month.”

The Fi­nance Min­is­ter de­scribed the cur­rent fi­nan­cial sit­u­a­tion is “un­sus­tain­able”, and go­ing for­ward, there must be a change in the coun­try’s ap­proach.

In the last three years, the sup­port to the Wa­ter and Sew­er­age Au­thor­i­ty (WASA) has been $7.28 bil­lion.

While the Trinidad and To­ba­go Elec­tric­i­ty Com­mis­sion (T&TEC) re­quires the sup­port of over $800 mil­lion a year to pay for the gas used to pro­duce elec­tric­i­ty and to ser­vice a se­ries of loans.

Im­bert lament­ed that sub­si­dies and trans­fers that make up al­most 50 per cent of the an­nu­al bud­get.

To deal with the dif­fi­cul­ties Im­bert said ad­di­tion­al un­bud­get­ed bor­row­ing and fur­ther with­drawals from the HSF for this year may be nec­es­sary.

“With a per­sis­tent bud­get deficit and un­cer­tain­ty as to when the glob­al and lo­cal econ­o­my will ful­ly re­cov­er from the de­struc­tive ef­fects of COVID-19, we sim­ply can’t af­ford sig­nif­i­cant wage in­creas­es at this time,” Im­bert said.

“Sim­ply put, if ex­ces­sive wage in­creas­es are grant­ed in the state sec­tor, then em­ploy­ment lev­els may have to be re­duced, be­cause the ad­di­tion­al mon­ey sim­ply isn’t there,” he said.