About $2 million dollars in government revenue projected to be collected as a result of the Business Licence Act 2010 will be wiped out by proposed ammendments to the act.
The benefit will accrue to the construction, hotel and gas-station sectors of the economy, according to Minister of State in the Ministry of Finance Zhivargo Laing. Addressing media at a press conference yesterday, the minister said the vast majority of businesses would see a reduction or no increase at all in taxes as a result of proposed ammendments.
“It was our intention in the first instance to make this exercise a tax neutral exercise, we were not seeking to raise any revenue form it,” Laing said. “And so really the industries that were affected… they were the ones where if we proceeded with the level of taxation that we would have applied to them there would have been probably about $2 million or more in revenue than we would have budgetted to receive.”
According to Laing, it was never the intention of the government to substantially increase the level of taxation on those industries and the adjustments will remedy that situation. The net impact on projected revenue is an overage of around $200,000, which he said was “spread across thousands of licensees.”
