By Trudy Simpson, Staff ReporterJAMAICANS HAVE been paying up their tax arrears but not at the rate that the Inland Revenue Department had hoped.
The revenue agency had set a target collection of $4.2 billion for the last quarter, but at the end of the period, delinquents had only cleared $2.3 billion, amounting to just over 50 per cent of projections for the July-September quarter.
"The shortfall is because of the nature of things in the economy," says Gladstone Turner, the revenue department's assistant commissioner of compliance.
NOT AS ROBUST
"There are some problems in the economy and things are not as robust as we were expecting them to be," said Mr. Turner, referring to problems such as the growing number of business shutdowns.
He said Jamaica also has a "culture of delinquency" where persons are either unaware they should pay or make no effort to pay General Consumption Tax (GCT), income, education, and other taxes.
"Why we have some of these difficulties is that we have diluted legislation to deal with persons who have a propensity to use the money as cash flow. We need to find a way to plug these holes," Mr. Turner said.
A report from Auditor-General Adrian Strachan last year, revealed that several Government agencies were using the proceeds from statutory deductions to supplement their budgets.
Parliament's Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has been reporting from as far back as 1999 that other public institutions invested rather than turned over statutory deductions.
AHEAD OF AMOUNTS
The Inland Revenue Department, in a release, said that the $2.282 billion collected between July and September represented a 21 per cent increase over the $1.886 billion in arrears collected in the first fiscal quarter -April to June. The department is also ahead of amounts collected last year, Mr. Turner said.
The agency is also stepping up its second quarter compliance activities and has brought 2,076 delinquent taxpayers before the courts for arrears totalling just over $1 billion.
Court orders valued at $142 million were made against 169 taxpayers islandwide and the number of summonses and levy warrants issued also increased.
The Department's Compliance Unit said it is also exercising a "softer" approach in improving collections by visiting taxpayers, conducting interviews and making payment arrangements.
