Dear Editor,
The Guyana Revenue Authority has recently demonstrated its extreme backwardness in its tax collecting operations by rejecting a cheque for property and income taxes because the taxpayer did not have a Tax Identification Number (TIN). The taxpayer, who lives in the USA, provided the revenue authority, through his agent, with the number of his passport, associated receipts of payments of insurance, rates and taxes, and the file number which has been used for several years to store his tax returns.
What is more contributory to the identification of this taxpayer is that the officials who rejected the cheque know the taxpayer very well.
The amount of taxes being paid was well over one million Guyana dollars. But it was refused even though the TIN was recently introduced and there are no arrangements to assign TINs to overseas taxpayers.
