Nakhid: $600m to establish Revenue Authority?

OPPOSITION Senator David Nakhid estimated that it would cost taxpayers $600-$700 million to establish a revenue authority.

He was speaking in the Senate on Friday against the Government's proposed Trinidad and Tobago Revenue Authority Bill 2021.

The TTRA is proposed as one body to replace the Inland Revenue and Customs and Excise Divisions.

Nakhid said he based his estimate on a previous figure of $350 million calculated in 2011, when the Finance Ministry was headed by Karen Nunez-Tesheira, helped by Mariano Browne.

Nakhid asked where Finance Minister Colm Imbert would find money to fund the TTRA, after the Government had just lost sums of $500 million and $200 million spent by the National Gas Company (NGC) towards helping Atlantic LNG Train One.

Alleging Imbert could not even dispense proper salary relief grants (during lockdowns in the pandemic) nor help the small and medium enterprises to get back on their feet, Nakhid lamented that Imbert now wanted to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a TTRA.

Nakhid also argued, "If it gives the Minister of Finance these unchecked powers we have to call it out."

He chided the Government for talking of the Board of Inland Revenue and Customs and Excise Division as if corruption, incompetence and inefficiency had just appeared out of nowhere.

Nakhid said people on the street were calling the authority "a new DSS,", in reference to pyramid-style operation called Drug Sou Sou (DSS) shut down by the police.

"Yes, this is the Government's DSS. They don't know how the money is coming in and where it is going. They don't know what they will do with it.

"They saying the 'D' stands for douen, so it's the Douen Sou Sou. The douen is a folkloric creature that we have in our culture, Mr President, you know that. He just comes in the night and takes whatever you worked hard for, just takes it and goes with it."

As to the Government's claims that existing workers at the IRD and Customs had nothing to fear regarding their job security, he said the bill did not address that.

"If you want to go down memory lane, we could take a look at Petrotrin. Eleven thousand workers sent home, on a lie. This is documented. You want the country to fall for another lie?" Nakhid said.