West speaks of stress raising revenue

The weaker-than-expected performance in some sectors of the economy, challenges faced by Government in divesting some assets, and underperformance of revenue collection agencies are reasons why a significant component of Government’s fiscal policy will be to address tax administration in this fiscal year.

So said Minister in the Ministry of Finance Allyson West ,who told the Senate in her budget presentation yesterday, the total revenue collected by Government in 2017 was some $10 billion less than budgeted.

“We therefore need to talk about tax administration,” she said, and Government’s decision to establish the semi-autonomous Revenue Authority (TTRA) that will be responsible for the collection and protection of government revenue.

“We propose to have the TTRA operational in 2018,” she said.

“To those persons who ask why we cannot fix the problems by reforming the Inland Revenue Division and the Customs and Excise Division,” she said, “successive governments have tried and failed in that task going back at least 30 years.”

The challenges in the current system, identified by a multi-stakeholder, non-political committee, she said, include deficient human resource management, inadequate management capability, accountability and training, and lack of control over and accountability for budgetary allocations.

Other challenges include inadequate employee compensation packages, high incidence of corruption and corrupt practices, inefficient systems for internal investigation and enforcement, inadequate information exchange and co-ordination between the administrations and of various taxes levied, poor customer relations, anti-business rules and regulations, and deficiencies in the legislative framework.

Issues that could have been addressed such as the acquisition of modern physical accommodation and extensive investments in both hardware and software to improve the information communication technology capacity of the two agencies were done within the present institutional, legislative and regulatory context, she said.