BELIZE CITY, Tues. July 6, 2021– Last Friday, during the sitting of the House of Representatives, Prime Minister and Minister of Finance and Economic Development, Hon. John Briceño introduced a slew of tax revenue recovery bills aimed at aggressively going after tax evaders. The Prime Minister announced that about 645 million dollars in taxes have not reached the government’s coffers over recent years.
Of that amount, 80% or almost 530 million dollars will soon be unrecoverable due to the statute of limitation for such arrears, the Prime Minister pointed out.
”As time goes by, millions of these tax arrears become exposed to being statute-barred; to say it plain, it means the government will not be able to collect these taxes. And this is what is going to get Belizeans very upset: of this six hundred and forty-five million dollars owed, eighty percent or over five hundred million dollars or over half a billion dollars is already more than five-years old. It is five hundred and thirty million and more than five years old, so pretty much you could say that most of this we’ll not be able to collect because it will become statute-barred,” said PM Briceno.
The government’s goal now is to bolster its tax collection capabilities and regain some of the tax revenue it has lost over the years. A new Tax Recovery Unit will be established by the legislation and will be tasked with pursuing tax evaders and prosecuting them for both civil and criminal tax offenses. The number of persons who could be categorized as tax evaders might be rather large, since Hon. Briceño noted that 20-25% of registered taxpayers fail to file tax returns each year.
“It’s simply not fair to have law-abiding corporate citizens paying their taxes and then you have a group of unscrupulous business people not paying their taxes; it’s unfair competition. We are convinced, Madam Speaker, that by doing these amendments and setting up the Belize Tax Recovery Unit we are going to be on the road to collect the money that belongs to the people and that we are going to have fair competition in the business community in Belize,” Prime Minister Briceño said.
The Prime Minister explained that the specialized unit inside the Belize Tax Service will be tasked with recovery of taxes and ensuring compliance for all taxes mandated by the various government agencies. These include business tax, GST, PAYE income tax, and even land tax. The Prime Minister said that the Minister of Natural Resources, Deputy Prime Minister Cordel Hyde, has informed him that the statute of limitation on land tax is 12 years —meaning there is still time for GOB to recover the tens of millions owed in land tax.
“Under the Tax Recovery Unit we are going to pursue a recovery of these taxes, because we recognize land tax represents a first lead under tax, and if it isn’t paid, then such land may be sold for recovery of outstanding taxes. As the Minister just pointed out to me, land tax isn’t like the others of six years, but it is twelve years, so we have enough time to go after these owners of land who have not been paying their taxes,” Hon. Briceño said.
The Prime Minister also stated that in the case of unpaid land taxes, the government would willingly accept repatriation of the land in lieu of tax payments, especially in those cases, he said, where the land has been left vacant by absentee foreign landowners.
“From our end, it is easy to settle when it comes to land tax, because if you nuh wah pay the tax, give we the land so that we could pass these lands to the Belizean people. And we are calling out these huge landowners, many of whom don’t live in Belize and probably don’t know where the land is in Belize. We are going to tell them ‘pay your taxes or else we are going to use what you are owing to get back some of that land for our Belizean people’,” the Prime Minister said.
On Friday, PM Briceño also introduced amendments to the Tax Administration and Procedure Act to allow for the names of those owing taxes to be published and to add a provision for the aforementioned criminal and civil offenses that will now arise from tax evasion.
With over half a billion dollars in taxes unpaid, the new Tax Recovery Unit will need all the help it can get from the Belize Tax Department to carry out its mandate. Employees from the department will also be subject to prosecution if they are found to have been involved in any act of corruption related to tax collections.