Marshall suggests outreach programme to capture outstanding taxes

Attorney General and Legal Affairs Minister Dale Marshall believes is time for the Barbados Revenue Authority (BRA) to have an outreach programme to capture outstanding taxes.

Insisting that there were individuals who did not pay but could be identified, he noted that every single Barbadian who was gainfully employed must “pay their way”.

“The same way the NIS officer can walk into my office, they can also walk into a mechanics or hairdressers, or a restaurant, or a bar or a shop and inquire as to whether the individual is registered. Why cannot the BRA do that? We know it is a voluntary system, but we pay officers taxpayers’ money and I can see no reason why the BRA cannot have an outreach programme.

“You do not want to frighten or terrorise people. In fact, many of the people they will capture are individuals who will not have to pay much in the way of taxes but the BRA needs to get up and go out and discover who are the persons engaged in businesses,” he said.

Speaking in Parliament yesterday, Marshall stated that routinely every business should be issued with a tax number by BRA.

The MP for St. Joseph outlined that the BRA has the ability to record judgements for taxes against individuals through the presentation of a memorandum at the High Court registry.

“So if they determine that you or I owe ‘x’ dollars or ‘y’ dollars all they have to do is prepare a memo of no more than four or five lines… they take it to the court registry, file it without paying a penny and immediately there is a judgement registered against you the tax payer who was in default. Now you cannot want a simpler mechanism for trying to get people to pay their fair share of taxes. This has been a provision of the Income Tax Act from the very day that it started,” he asserted and questioned why the authority had not been enforcing this.

Marshall therefore urged the Ministry of Finance to address this issue. (JMB)