State en­ti­ties owed the Wa­ter and Sew­er­age Au­thor­i­ty (WASA) a to­tal of $146.1 mil­lion as of March 31 of this year. From 2020 to 2024, they re­paid debts to WASA to­talling $153.3 mil­lion.

This was con­firmed in a writ­ten re­ply to a ques­tion posed by the Op­po­si­tion in Par­lia­ment to Pub­lic Util­i­ties Min­is­ter Mar­vin Gon­za­les. The re­ply was cir­cu­lat­ed dur­ing Mon­day’s Par­lia­ment sit­ting.

Gon­za­les was asked to pro­vide a de­tailed break­down for the pe­ri­od Sep­tem­ber 1, 2020, to March 31, 2024.

The writ­ten re­ply stat­ed that the to­tal in­debt­ed­ness of state en­ti­ties or agen­cies to WASA as of March 31 was $146,174,097.15. 

The amount owed by each state en­ti­ty/agency to the au­thor­i­ty was al­so pro­vid­ed.

*please use in a box*

Mon­ey owed: 

Fi­nance en­ti­ties $276,013.02, 

For­eign Af­fairs $104,593.60, 

At­tor­ney Gen­er­al’s Min­istry $9,191.52, 

Health/RHAs $3.3M, 

Na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty agen­cies $4.5M, 

Pub­lic Ad­min­is­tra­tion $2.6M, 

Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment/cor­po­ra­tions $4.6M,

Works agen­cies $5.1M, 

Agri­cul­ture agen­cies $10.8M, 

Sport en­ti­ties $3.8M, 

Ed­u­ca­tion en­ti­ties $16.2M,  

Youth De­vel­op­ment Min­istry $3,779.60, 

Of­fice of the Prime Min­is­ter $5.3M, 

Ju­di­cia­ry $85,392.53, 

Pub­lic Util­i­ties agen­cies $2.6M, 

Tourism agen­cies $21,788.85,

Plan­ning $2.3M, 

Hous­ing $30.1M, 

En­er­gy en­ti­ties $52.9M, 

Elec­tion and Bound­aries Com­mis­sion $6,192, 

Hu­man De­vel­op­ment $127, 382.45,

Oth­er en­ti­ties $695,450. 83.

The to­tal debt re­paid to WASA by each state en­ti­ty or agency over the cor­re­spond­ing pe­ri­od was just over $153 mil­lion, or $153,233,493.55 specif­i­cal­ly. 

The min­is­ter’s re­ply not­ed that WASA has in­di­cat­ed that it has a clear­ly de­fined process for col­lect­ing “past due” ac­counts, be­gin­ning when an ac­count first be­comes delin­quent and con­tin­u­ing un­til the debt is col­lect­ed. 

It was stat­ed that mea­sures have been im­ple­ment­ed to avoid any fu­ture ac­cu­mu­la­tion of debt by state en­ti­ties or agen­cies, in­clud­ing the Per­ma­nent Sec­re­tary from the Pub­lic Util­i­ties Min­istry li­ais­ing with the Per­ma­nent Sec­re­taries of the re­spec­tive state en­ti­ties or agen­cies about the debt to the au­thor­i­ty, a re­quest to liq­ui­date the out­stand­ing sums, let­ters on a quar­ter­ly ba­sis, meet­ings with re­spec­tive min­is­ters, and ne­go­ti­at­ing pay­ment plans. 

Close to 40,000 as­sess­ment no­tices is­sued for prop­er­ty tax

On an­oth­er op­po­si­tion query, Hous­ing Min­is­ter Camille Robin­son-Reg­is said 32,940 as­sess­ment no­tices were is­sued by the In­land Rev­enue Di­vi­sion for the pe­ri­od Jan­u­ary 1 to April 2 this year. 

These have been is­sued by the In­land Rev­enue in re­la­tion to the prop­er­ty tax. The IR is the agency man­dat­ed to is­sue the as­sess­ment no­tice af­ter the Val­u­a­tion Di­vi­sion as­sess­es prop­er­ties.

In March, Gov­ern­ment ap­proved a re­duc­tion of the res­i­den­tial prop­er­ty tax from 3% to 2%, ceased col­lec­tion of prop­er­ty tax (which start­ed in March) un­til the new rate of tax is in ef­fect, ex­tend­ed the time for the IR to is­sue as­sess­ment no­tices up to June 30, 2024, and ex­tend­ed the time for ob­jec­tions to be pre­sent­ed to six months af­ter the val­u­a­tion no­tice is is­sued.