While the business community remains optimistic that their profits will increase this year they want the current 16 percent Value Added Tax reduced to at least 12 percent.
This is according to a recent attitudinal survey conducted by the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry and whose findings were released yesterday at a press briefing, by GCCI President Clinton Urling, at the Chamber’s headquarters, Waterloo Street.
“Nearly three out of every four respondents (74%) expect to see increased revenues in 2012 while 25% expect revenues to remain stable.” It added “A significant proportion of businesses (89%) believe that the current VAT rate of 16% was inappropriate with the majority indicating that the rate was too high and should be pegged between 10-12%…Only a handful of participants (5%) believed that VAT should be higher than 13%” the survey said.
Undertaken during January to March of this year, the survey sought to gauge the business community’s “needs, concerns and obstacles to fulfilling their performance potential while acting as a sounding board for possible government interaction and relationship building”, the survey stated.
For the year 2011 eighty-eight percent of participants reported an increase in the financial cost of doing business and an astounding ninety-six percent expects that the trend will continue.
Of the eighty-six members participating, 40% continued to seek and secure commercial bank financing, buy land and buildings and acquiring capital equipment among other reasons, Urling related to the media.
Essential to the success of many of the businesses over sixty percent listed finding and keeping good employees as number one.
Noteworthy, Urling said, was that three out of five of the respondents positively viewed government’s attitude towards business in Guyana.
GCCI says that the survey will assist in creating a database for follow up studies among the private sector ultimately leading to effective measures and informing them of business and economic issues that are timely and that warrant pro-active advocacy on the chamber’s membership and by extension the nation’s private sector.
