Property Tax Reform Creeps And Crawls

As someone who is constantly looking for information on Trinidad and Tobago's Property Tax Reform - and since we at KnowTnT.com have been keeping an eye on it and writing about it - it is somewhat humorous that there has been an announced extension on Property Tax Reform. And even some information: 

...Nunez-Tesheira also explained in the same interview that Government decided to extend the deadline for the non-payment of property tax from September 15 to December 31, for this first year.

 

’March 31 is the date by which the bills must go out and then from September 15, penalties would accrue. We expect that we would be able to send out all the property tax bills during the month of April...and since we are extending the period for payment through the month of April, we are extending the deadline for the penalty to December 31.’

 

She added that Government was collecting a lot of data coming from two systems that were running parallel to each other- the Land and Building system and the Municipal and Regional Corporation system...

'Running parallel', to an external observer, might hint at 'redundant system' - but in a country where a fair amount of houses aren't in the Land and Building system and the Municipal and Regional Corporation system can be decades behind (I know, personally) - there's a lot of work that needs to be done. And, from what I understand, the systems are incompatible since Town and Country approvals don't deal in assessment numbers or deed numbers. Seriously.

I fully expect that there will be problems when the data hits people's mailboxes. In essence: They probably should have spent more time on Calder Hart instead of trying to push a reform that they clearly weren't ready for.

I wonder if Calder Hart paid his property taxes before leaving the country? Or did he take it with him?