VAT will not be cut this year as had been promised by APNU+AFC, the biggest miss so far in the 100-day agenda that it had laid out, but Finance Minister Winston Jordan yesterday assured that the other monetary-related pledges will be kept.
The breaching of the promise to cut the 16% Value-Added Tax (VAT) will be seen as evidence of an overly optimistic agenda by the coalition and one that was not grounded in a careful study and Jordan himself referred to it at a pre-budget press conference at the Ministry of Finance. Budget day is Monday.
“…I will say, again, you cannot wake up one night and determine that you are going to fiddle with a tax that you heavily depend on without having the benefit of a substantial study on that tax telling you by how much you can remove it and how much you will lose and what new
