The Guyana Revenue Authority (GRA) came in for high praise recently from Finance Minister Winston Jordan, who noted that since new management has taken over, there has been an explosion of revenue at the tax collection agency.
During an exclusive interview with the Guyana Standard, Jordan said, “It was only on Saturday last, at the GRA family fun day, that I commended the Commissioner-General, Godfrey Statia, and his staff for a job well done. Revenues have indeed exploded. They did a tremendous job in recovering revenues and broadening the tax base.”
The economist added, “There is a greater number of taxpayers on the tax roll and this has helped us to gradually reduce taxes in the last four years in a number of areas while increasing expenditure rapidly on the Public Sector Investment Programme (PSIP) as well as on the current side,” he said.
He added, “Also, we have been able to improve salaries by 64 percent between 2015 when we came in and 2018.”
Jordan boasted that it took his government a mere three and a half years to achieve this while the former regime took nine years to increase salaries by 62 percent.
Speaking to other achievements, Jordan reminded that the government has been able to deliver a more comprehensive and simplified tax system. In this regard, he noted that the government was able to reduce company tax for non-commercial companies from 30 percent to 25 percent; reduce the Value Added Tax from 16 percent to 14 percent; increase in the VAT threshold from $10M to $15M; implement a special income tax rate of 25 percent for small businesses; increase in the threshold for filing a property tax return from $0.5M to $40M, and reduce the property tax rate on chargeable property.
