‘PAY YOUR TAXES’

THE Barbados Revenue Authority (BRA) is urging land and property owners to pay up or else.

With some individuals in arrears up to 20 years, Revenue Commissioner (Ag.), Wayne Forde, said that the BRA will be using all avenues to recover taxes owed.

“We will be putting up a series of properties for sale to recover those taxes. So by July, you might see a publication of a lot of properties,” he told members of the media on the sidelines of the launch of BRA’s Customer Service Charter, held in Heroes Square, yesterday.

“The law states that if you are in arrears for 90 days, you are eligible to have your property sold… Although it maybe law, it is not really feasible because anything could have happened in 90 days. But, we have persons who have been in arrears for at least 20 years. And what some people do when we try to contact them is sometimes pay a little bit just to get us off their backs… Those are the persons who I deem as chronic defaulters, so those are the ones who we will be targeting – ranging from five years to over 20 years.

“Also, we have the authority to garnish persons, especially third party. For instance, if there is a company that owes us, and we know that they rent their building – we can ask that the tenant pay the funds directly to us,” he revealed.

Moreover, BRA recorded over 5 200 in undelivered land tax bills and other mail from the post office since being mailed in September last year. The returned bills are due to incorrect addresses for the land and property owners. In over 1 000 cases, the addressees were labelled as deceased.

“We are trying to get hold of the people, so we decided to put their names on our website. In a lot of cases we also realised that a lot of people whose notices were returned have been in arrears for quite a while,” Forde indicated, also urging the public to advise BRA in a timely manner of developments, such as change of address, commencement or cessation of business that are relevant to their tax affairs. (TL)