Local private sector organisations should consider a review of their membership rules to allow businesses to be subjected to due diligence aimed at verifying their compliance with the timely payment of taxes and NIS, Chairman of the Commission of Enquiry into the operations of the Mayor and City Council Keith Burrowes told Stabroek Business in an interview earlier this week.
“I do not believe that it is asking too much to seek the help of these private sector organisations [including the Private Sector Commission (PSC) and the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry (GCCI)] to ensure that businesses in the city comply” with municipal and national regulations and other rules pertaining to building codes that apply to the operation of businesses in the city. “In fact these private sector organisations should consider these to be part of their corporate social responsibility,” Burrowes told Stabroek Business.
In the wake of the release of the findings of the Report of the Commission of Enquiry and the subsequent promulgation of the municipality’s $3 billion 2010 budget, Burrowes is advocating “a closer, more energetic collaborative relationship” between City Hall and the business community to ensure that the recommendations contained in the report and the delivery targets outlined in this year’s municipal budget are met. “The fact is that the implementation of both the recommendations of the Commission of Enquiry and this year’s budget cannot be accomplished without the wholehearted support of the private sector, through the various business enterprises themselves and through their various umbrella organisations,” Burrowes told Stabroek Business. The council will simply be unable to accomplish what it seeks to without that support,” Burrowes said.
Noting that he was not seeking to provide “excuses for the deficiencies of the Georgetown municipality,” Burrowes told Stabroek Business that it was “entirely unacceptable” that various private sector bodies not feel responsible for at least attempting to reduce the level of delinquency of some business houses “in areas such as garbage disposal, the payment of rates and taxes and compliance with zoning regulations and building codes.” He said that many of the individual businessmen with whom he had spoken during the hearings of the Commission of Enquiry had voiced their concern about the state of the city. “My response is that if the private sector seeks to hold City Hall to a higher order it must itself find ways of supporting City Hall by finding ways of ensuring that businesses in the city regulate themselves in a manner that ensures compliance with their obligations to the city. The Council will never be able to provide the kind of city which the private sector says it wants except the private sector can assist in reining in its own delinquents.”
Over the years, City Hall has persistently taken aim at what it says is the disregard shown by several business houses for their obligations to City Hall, citing non-payment or less than timely payment of rates and taxes, disregard for building codes and zoning regulations that pronounce on construction and location requirements for business premises and on what Burrowes described as “the organised illegal dumping of garbage.”
Burrowes told Stabroek Business that he believes that private sector organisations can be “particularly instrumental” in supporting the council in its efforts to collect huge sums of monies owing to the council in rates and taxes. “It really is a matter of will on the part of the private sector organisations. If they assume a posture of zero tolerance on delinquencies relating to the payment of rates and taxes that will obviously create a condition of pressure for business houses which will result in some measure of improvement in this area,” Burrowes said.
Apart from ratepayer delinquency, City Hall has been stymied in its efforts to initiate and effective rate and tax collection regime on account of serious discrepancies in its own records. Burrowes told Stabroek Business that the municipality is currently in the midst of an exercise aimed at bringing some measure of reliability to the council’s records. “For all sorts of reasons it is a particularly challenging task. We have a situation, for example, in which, over the past few years a few hundred businesses of one sort or another have sprung up in the capital. Many of these have been converted from dwelling houses to business places but which still pay taxes based on the 40% of the value of the property applied to dwelling houses rather than the 250% of the value of the property that applies to business places.”
Burrowes told Stabroek Business that while, on the one hand, this circumstance might be construed as a delinquency on the part of City Hall, there are several cases in which these new business places might not even be registered with the municipality.
“This has to do with existing serious deficiencies in the level of coordination among the various stakeholders responsible for overseeing matters to do with planning permission. What we need, among other things, is a re-evaluation of the relationship between the Georgetown municipality and the Central Housing and Planning Authority to ensure the regularisation of the procedures associated with construction in the city. Here again, I believe that the private sector organisations can help by developing protocols that frown on these irregular practices and work with City Hall to help eradicate them,” Burrowes said.
Meanwhile, Burrowes is calling for “a far more robust official position” from private sector organisations about the indiscriminate dumping of garbage by business houses in the city. “Very often we associate the indiscriminate dumping by ordinary citizens whom we either dismiss as people who don’t know better or are simply irresponsible. The fact is that a great deal of the blame should be placed at the doors of city business houses, supposedly responsible corporate citizens, who do their illegal dumping in a highly organised manner. I have advocated that rather than continue to view the problem as a one that simply cannot be resolved we seek to target and waylay some of the offenders and gather the kind of evidence that allows us to make examples of them. We should test the laws to see whether this will not bring a measure of change to the situation,” Burrowes said.
A critical re-valuation exercise which is expected to increase rates and taxes on urban properties and broaden the council’s revenue base has been long-delayed by what this newspaper understands are technical limitations in the state-run valuation unit. Burrowes told Stabroek Business that while such constraints may well exist there are other approaches that can be applied to pursuing the valuation exercise. “We can hardly overestimate the importance of this exercise. It is absolutely critical to increasing the revenue base of the council in order that it can achieve its objectives.”
Meanwhile, Burrowes is advocating that the business community take advantage of what he described as “a significant cultural shift” in the manner in which the municipal budget is being promulgated. “Apart from the fact that the 2010 budget is a public document to which every citizen is allowed access, the way in which the budget is structured allows for citizens, including business organisations to monitor the extent to which City Hall is meeting the targets set out in the budget. Private sector organisations should seek to obtain copies of the budget which would allow for close monitoring of progress towards set targets and enable the private sector to engage City Hall in constructive discourses on the goals set out in the budget.”
