Manufacturers called for better customs and port operations, an improvement in the ease of doing business and a continuation in payment of VAT returns during the TTMA's post-budget forum on Tuesday.
TTMA president Tricia Coosal, addressing stakeholders and Finance Minister Colm Imbert at the Hyatt Regency, Port of Spain, said one of the obstacles to business is crime and called for “practical and successful solutions” to the scourge of crime.
“The escalating crime translates as a disincentive to investment, higher costs to operate, possible brain drain and other such ills to the society. The effects of these factors erode our competitiveness,” she said.
Coosal along with fellow panellist, Amjad Ali, the executive director of Advance Foam, highlighted the ease of doing business as one of the areas with which manufacturers were still struggling.
Coosal said the development of more efficient border agencies, port operations, tax collection, data collection and a digitalised environment would improve investors’ confidence and the demand to do business in TT.
Ali also knocked the customs and excise divisions.
“Far too often businesses are held to ransom because of the inefficiencies that they experienced by those bodies,” Ali said.
He added that higher priority needed to be placed on trade facilitation, meaning that businesses and the government would need to take another look at how they think about business operations.
Arthur Lok Jack, former chairman of the TT Export Development Corporation, Eximbank and the TTMA, took Imbert to task on VAT refunds, saying some businesses still have not been fully paid. He said the slow pace of payments is a “tremendous blow” to businesses' cash flow.
“We cost our export prices without VAT, but we pay it. In my group alone (Associated Brands) the government has tens of millions of dollars in VAT refunds long time now outstanding; and this is money that we are not getting back and we need, so we would have to use bank borrowings with huge interests to get that money back.”
“I have no problems with the budget. I don’t need any more incentives. The main thing is, you cannot incentivise us to get into export, then penalise us with VAT.”
Imbert said billions of dollars were paid out in VAT refunds in 2022 and more would be paid this year.
“The available money in the 2023 budget is somewhere close to $4 billion more than what was spent in 2022. Two billion of that is going into capital, programmes and development work, one billion is going into paying bills, because we have been trying to pay off those things systematically.”
In May Imbert announced that $1.6 billion of the supplemented expenditure would be allocated to an increase in payment of VAT refunds for April to September 2022.
Imbert conceded that border agencies such as the Customs and Excise Division needed improvement.
[caption id="attachment_977707" align="alignnone" width="1024"] TTMA members at the post-budget discussion, Hyatt Regency, Port of Spain on Tuesday. Photo by Sureash Cholai[/captio
