PM: An economic rebirthBy Clint Chan Tack Thursday, September 9 2010
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In a good mood: Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar and Works and Transport Minister Jack Warner are in a jovial mood before the Budget presentation...
PRIME MINISTER Kamla Persad-Bissessar yesterday disclosed that despite an estimated $13 billion in uncollected taxes, Government will still be able to fund all of the initiatives outlined in the 2011 Budget without introducing any new taxes or increasing the rate of any existing tax in the future.
The Prime Minister made this disclosure to reporters moments after Finance Minister Winston Dookeran presented the $49 billion fiscal package in the House of Representatives yesterday. She described the Budget as the start of the “economic rebirth” of Trinidad and Tobago.
While reiterating that Government kept its promise not to include any new taxes in the Budget, Persad-Bissessar said there was a tremendous amount of haemorraghing in the collection of taxes. “I am advised there is almost $13 billion in uncollected taxes,” she said. Rather than introduce new taxes to collect revenue, Persad-Bissessar said Government decided to provide a tax amnesty instead.
“So here’s the carrot rather than the stick. We will apply that method first with the tax amnesty to encourage people to pay up their taxes so we can get more collections like that and secondly, of course, we have other ways to increase the efficiency of tax collection.” Expressing confidence that the Budget will restore sanity in the country’s financial and social sectors, Persad-Bissessar said Government took the tough but necessary decisions to scrap the Alutrint aluminium smelter project and the rapid rail project.
Explaining Government would have been unable to sustain the expenditure on these projects, the Prime Minister said in the case of Alutrint, “we could put our gas to better use and better purpose than in Alutrint.”
Persad-Bissessar said Government will seek to disengage itself from the contractual arrangements entered by its PNM predecessor in accordance with the law. She reiterated that had Government failed to abort these projects, “we would have lost far more money and squandered far more money and gone against the wishes of the people.”
Describing the Clico fiasco as a $19 billion “black hole” which the Government had to deal with, the Prime Minister was confident that policyholders would receive some relief from the measures outlined in the Budget.
Persad-Bissessar said Government had no plans to remove the petroleum subsidy, even as it outlined incentives in the Budget for citizens to use alternate forms of energy. “What we are saying is that we are doing measures otherwise, incentives are being given to our citizens to use other forms of energy so that you will decrease the amount of the petroleum subsidy.”
Stating that Government’s review of the minimum wage is ongoing and special purposes companies such as Udecott will have a role to play in the country’s economic turnaround once it has proper regulatory oversight, the Prime Minister declared, “For those who have said we have no plan, we have a plan.
The plan has always been that of our manifesto.
That plan was adopted as government policy and that informed the Budget presentation.”
