UNC Senator: Let rent-collectors pay property tax

THE Government should collect tax from people renting out apartment blocks for profit, not from individual homeowners, Opposition Senator Jayanti Lutchmedial-Ramdial said on March 25.

The Senate debated the Property Tax (Amendment) Bill 2024.

“Equity – and what you could afford – has absolutely no connection to what the property you live in could be rented for.

“If this Government was concerned about equity and fair collection of taxes, you know what they would do? They would go after all those multi-storey apartment buildings going up all over the country where people collecting rent in cash and not paying taxes to the Board of Inland Revenue,” she said, jabbing her pen at the government benches.

Unlike claims made about unqualified individuals doing property-tax valuations, she said, in contrast, that to pay stamp duty to the BIR, a property buyer must pay a valuer approved bythe Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors.

“The minister must come here today and tell us what are the qualifications of the persons who conducted these valuations.”

Lutchmedial-Ramdial complained about the objection process. “Your first line of defence is to object to the same Commissioner of Valuations who told you that this is the valuation.”

The second defence is to go to the valuations tribunal, but she said none exists despite being proposed in place of the Tax Appeal Board. While property owners get six months to appeal against a valuation, they might wait six years for a response and must still pay the tax, she lamented.

“Why don’t you set a time frame within which all objections must be dealt with?”

Lutchmedial-Ramdial also lamented that people cannot file objections locally but only in Port of Spain.

“And no form available online for them to do that. So this is what the citizens face while the Government talks about collecting tax to deliver services.”

She said extra time to do valuations must also be enjoyed by individuals.

Lutchmedial-Ramdial said the Government proposed to give itself law-making power to set property-tax percentage rates, but Parliament should do so by affirmative voting. She warned that under the Property Tax Act, if the tax is unpaid after five years Government can seize your property.

“The citizens of the country deserve to know that even with an objection pending before Valuations Division, if they cannot afford to pay, the BIR or the Revenue Authority has the power to come and pick up your bed and your fridge and your stove to satisfy tax.”
Interest and penalties would accrue, she added.

While corporation tax appeals at the Tax Appeal Board enjoy a “stop” on interest, under the property tax, individual citizens do not.

The Government should scrap the entire process and collections, with nothing payable until appeals were heard, Lutchmedial- Ramdial said. She said making someone pay property tax while appealing was “like putting the noose around a man’s neck while he still has his appeal against the death penalty.

“I want to make a promise to this Government here today: the day this Government takes steps to utilise the power to distrain or the power to seize anybody’s property while they have an objection pending, I will see you in court.”

She recalled making the Government rescind a property tax form in 2017 in the Appeal Court.

Saying the Auditor General’s Department wanted insight into the BIR’s taxes collected, she urged accountability in the spending of taxes. Relating she had just paid $700 for a truckload of water, she said, “If access to water – a basic fundamental human right – was to be included in anybody’s valuation, nobody in this country should have to pay property tax.”