Gail Alexan­der

The day af­ter law for the T&T Rev­enue Au­thor­i­ty is passed, the leg­is­la­tion will be chal­lenged in the High Court, UNC Sen­a­tor Wade Mark has de­clared.

“This bill is un­con­sti­tu­tion­al, il­le­gal, un­law­ful, ul­tra vires and null and void!” he said in the yes­ter­day’s Sen­ate de­bate on the TTRA Bill.

“I want to call on the Gov­ern­ment to say – not like Mr (Abu) Bakr ‘warned’ the Gov­ern­ment – the day af­ter it’s passed it will be tak­en be­fore the High Court and tak­en all the way up to the Privy Coun­cil! This bill puts too much pow­er in the hands of a po­lit­i­cal di­rec­torate!”

Ac­cus­ing Gov­ern­ment of “over­whelm­ing moves” to take con­trol of T&T’s wealth, Mark said the bill, which the UNC dubbed the “Im­bert Rev­enue Au­thor­i­ty,” will cre­ate a new fi­nan­cial “czar.”

He said its “egre­gious as­sault on the Con­sti­tu­tion “will give the min­is­ter over-reach of pow­er to ap­point peo­ple to key TTRA board posts and give gen­er­al pol­i­cy di­rec­tives.”

He said the “sting in the tail” of the bill in­cludes where the TTRA’s di­rec­tor gen­er­al can al­so get gen­er­al di­rec­tives from the board, “So the min­is­ter’s still in charge – the DG is a pup­pet of the board.’’

Mark said it was a recipe for cor­rup­tion and nepo­tism and the UNC can­not sup­port this. He said it’s dan­ger­ous for a TTRA to be sub­servient to the dic­tates of any gov­ern­ment. He said a rev­enue of­fi­cer has more pow­er than a po­lice of­fi­cer in be­ing able to make as­sess­ments for the pub­lic.

He pro­ject­ed that BIR staff will be fired and PNM par­ty faith­ful will be put in charge in the TTRA on short term con­tracts.

In­de­pen­dent Sen­a­tor Charisse Seep­er­sad ac­knowl­edged Gov­ern­ment rev­enue need­ed to in­crease. How­ev­er, she rec­om­mend­ed that the Pres­i­dent – not the min­is­ter – should ap­point TTRA board mem­bers.

Seep­er­sad al­so ad­vo­cat­ed for a strong tax­pay­er bill of rights to be cre­at­ed to pro­tect cit­i­zens.

She al­so called for train­ing and re­train­ing of staff as BIR ser­vice was poor to mediocre and not geared to be­ing su­pe­ri­or cus­tomer ser­vice.