President Bharrat Jagdeo said that government would review the situation with regard to the Value Added Tax (VAT) transition in light of the complaints surfacing and may be making adjustments this week to ease the burden on consumers.
In a statement issued yesterday the President said: “We need to address this. We will review the situation and [this week] we probably will be making some adjustments.”
He said that the government, as it had stated in the beginning, would be monitoring the implementation of VAT with a view to having a functioning system which didn’t impose much burden on the consuming public.
According to a Govern-ment Information Agency (GINA) press release yesterday, President Jagdeo said that the government through the Guyana Revenue Autho-rity (GRA) and the Ministry of Finance had been closely monitoring the implementation of VAT and the feedback had been mixed.
“We are very pleased that the system seems to be settling down now, although there are many areas of concern and we have expressed these concerns prior to the introduction of VAT,” President Jagdeo said. He added that the biggest fear of the government at that time was that the adjustments made to the other taxes previously paid by consumers would be at a lower rate and the benefits would not be passed on to the consuming public. “Many of their fears and concerns are justified because we have seen a lot of items not reflecting those downward changes,” the president said.
On the other hand, he said that some of the findings in the business community had been very encouraging. He cited Bakewell as an example of this, saying that this company had retained their wholesale price of $152 for a loaf of wholewheat bread with the recommended selling price being $180, “so there is no price change to the retailers.”
But he said that despite the price remaining the same some people had been retailing a loaf of the same bread for $200 and $220. He also expressed concern about the price of foodstuff containing protein. “In some markets the prices for meat did not move much,” he was quoted as saying, “but in the supermarkets that have the 16 per cent VAT we have seen some upward movement.”
