Akash Sama­roo

Lead Ed­i­tor-Pol­i­tics

akash.sama­roo@cnc3.co.tt

Fi­nance Min­is­ter Dav­en­dranath Tan­coo says Colm Im­bert is be­ing disin­gen­u­ous and pre­tend­ing to care about the “small man” in his crit­i­cism of the Fi­nance Bill, when in re­al­i­ty he is seek­ing to pro­tect his own in­ter­ests.

At yes­ter­day’s Op­po­si­tion news brief­ing, Im­bert raised con­cern about the Land­lord Sur­charge and its ef­fects on the av­er­age cit­i­zen.

He al­so ex­pressed alarm over a Clause in the Bill that will al­low two po­lit­i­cal ap­pointees to the Board of In­land Rev­enue’s board who Im­bert said would have ac­cess to cit­i­zens’ tax in­for­ma­tion.

As it per­tains to the Land­lord Sur­charge, the Fi­nance Min­is­ter said Im­bert him­self is a land­lord and is on­ly con­cerned about him­self and his friends.

“Im­bert is seek­ing to pro­tect his wealthy friends un­der the pre­text of con­cern for av­er­age cit­i­zens. The coun­try has not for­got­ten or for­giv­en his demon­strat­ed dis­dain for and his ar­ro­gance to­wards the work­ing class and the pop­u­la­tion.”

Im­bert ad­mit­ted that he does own prop­er­ties but said his re­al con­cern was for peo­ple who may not have the fi­nan­cial means to be com­pli­ant with the new law.

“I do have rental prop­er­ties. I have an ac­coun­tant and I will be reg­is­ter­ing with the Board of In­land Rev­enue and in full com­pli­ance with the law as I am in all my busi­ness ac­tiv­i­ties. This is not for me. I’m not the prob­lem. The prob­lem is all the thou­sands, the 50,000 lit­tle peo­ple. That’s the point I want to make. The peo­ple will be af­fect­ed by this. The lit­tle old per­son, the pen­sion­er who is rent­ing out a room in their house, who is us­ing that ad­di­tion­al in­come to sur­vive, they won’t be able to com­ply with this con­vo­lut­ed law,” Im­bert re­spond­ed.

With re­spect to Im­bert’s con­cern over the pub­lic’s tax in­for­ma­tion be­ing avail­able to po­lit­i­cal ap­pointees on BIR’s board, Tan­coo said, “Im­bert needs to stop judg­ing peo­ple by his low stan­dards. This ad­min­is­tra­tion will cer­tain­ly not adopt his prac­tices. This Gov­ern­ment is com­mit­ted to a more ef­fi­cient and fair rev­enue col­lec­tion sys­tem and all of his fake sto­ries and scare tac­tics will not de­ter us.”

He added, “This is the same man who gut­ted the BIR and presided over a ten bil­lion tax gap, with BIR hav­ing a third of the staff they need­ed, sab­o­tag­ing rev­enue col­lec­tion at a time when the coun­try need­ed it most.”

Tan­coo said Im­bert should re­mem­ber that he was “fired” as fi­nance min­is­ter just be­fore the PNM lost the April 28 gen­er­al elec­tion.