Skip to content

User login

Advertising

Home

Category: TaxSyndicate content

Recommendations for the 2009 proposed property tax implementation

November 19, 2009 by Edmund Gall

Note: The following was sent as a letter to the editor and published by the Trinidad Guardian in September 2009.  In support of the discussion that Taran Rampersad's recent post is likely to trigger, I reproduce it in this forum.

I wish to propose the following as an alternative, fairer method for calculating property tax, based loosely on the way council tax is calculated in the UK.

  • The central government establishes the policy that property tax revenue should be used to cover ONLY recurrent local government expenditure.  If any local government council needs capital expenditure, it should come out of the national tax pool, subject to the existing approval process (e.g. Ministry of Finance, Cabinet).

  • All local government councils must submit recurrent expenditure budgets and a summary of savings they've generated in the past year to the Ministry of Finance three months before the end of the financial year.  The savings are based on examples where they achieved the same level of services at lower than budgeted cost (e.g. due to contract re-negotiation, outsourcing).  These savings can be used to gain extra grants from the national tax pool and thus encourage local government councils to practice sound financial management.

{Read more}

Property Tax Reform Facts Provided To Citizens of Trinidad and Tobago. (Sort of)

November 19, 2009 by Taran Rampersad

The property tax reform (2009) in Trinidad and Tobago has received a lot of attention in the media, and to date there hasn't been a lot of information on it. Instead of citing specific articles, I'll just point to the smorgasbord available through Google. And while it has been very interesting to watch politicians shuffle around (Kamla Persad-Bissessar in particular) when it comes to who is doing what, the fact is that the general public hasn't gotten that much information about the topic.

All around Trinidad and Tobago this week, people have received informational brochures regarding property taxes in Trinidad and Tobago. There are 6 pages to it, not including the covers, and it seems well organized - and dare I say, informational.

Some highlights: {Read more}

  • The property tax reform will be effective as of January 1st, 2010. It's unclear how this will affect people such as myself who pay their land taxes in the 6th month of the year - whether we will pay for half the year based on the new rate, or what have you.
  • It is claimed that the new tax will be more equitable across Trinidad and Tobago.
  • The Annual Taxable Value (ATV) is the value of the property used to calculate the property tax, and the ATV will be decided by the 'qualified professionals at the Valuation Division of the Ministry of Finance'. Buildings will be taxed based on the category of the property (executive, modern, standard, substandard and shack), the size of the property and the location of the property. The latter seems a bit tongue in cheek when it comes to the reform being 'more equitable', since part of the problem the reform claims to address is the variance in property tax between various areas.
AdaptiveThemes