The Guyana Revenue Authority (GRA) says the 105,522 figure listed in the 2017 Auditor General’s Report of self-employed persons is not accurate as it contains the names of pensioners, housewives, the deceased and persons who had migrated, among others.
In a statement yesterday, the GRA was responding to a report in the October 23rd edition of Stabroek News headlined `Over 80% active self-employed didn’t submit income tax returns’ which was based on the findings of the Auditor General’s Report on the public accounts for 2017.
It said its response is necessary to “remove any doubt that the GRA sits idly by and allow such a high degree of non-compliance by this segment of the taxpaying population”.
The GRA cited the Auditor General’s report as stating that there were 105,522 active registered self-employed persons in the TRIPS database of which only 18,351 persons or 17% of the active registrants filed returns. “What the (Auditor General’s) report neglected to state was that the said listing included but was not limited to pensioners, housewives, deceased persons, persons who would have migrated, persons granted a Taxpayer Identification Number (TIN) to transact business with the central and commercial banks as well as those transacting business with the GRA, thereby erroneously misleading the general public as regards the percentage of self-employed taxpayers filing income tax returns”, the GRA said.
It said that this was explained at length by Commissioner General, Godfrey Statia when giving evidence and providing explanations before the last Public Accounts Committee hearing where he had explained that the list included several categories of persons who could not be classified as active taxpayers.
“The Commissioner General also made it abundantly clear that the TRIPS system is flawed and does not provide an accurate representation of the active self-employed taxpayers, and as a consequence, statements based solely on information extracted from it would be erroneous and misleading”, the GRA said.
The GRA said it has also explained that preliminary data cleansing activity has uncovered various categories of taxpayers to be removed, and work is currently on-going in this area.
“Recently, at our last review, out of the total of 618,105 registered taxpayers on TRIPS, 350,967 were found to be dormant and/or invalid, with these presently being removed from the database, leaving the remaining active taxpayers at 267,138. This figure includes all taxpayers, not just the self-employed taxpayers, and is currently being subjected to further cleansing to remove duplicate persons etc”, the GRA said.
Consequently, the GRA said that the statement that “billions of taxes (are) not being collected” with regards to self-employed persons is not only downright questionable but also misleading.
