VAT on SBAs?

Mar 09, 2017 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

The government has quite skillfully neutralized widespread protests over its taxes on private medical services and private tuition, by playing the poor off against the rich.
People were told that there is always an option to avoid the tax: seek public health care and public education. In other words, the rich can afford to pay and this is why they opt for the private medical services and private education.
The playoff between the poor and rich was taken a step further. The government claimed that some private schools were collectively earning billions of dollars and some of them were not compliant with their taxes.
The poor man, upon learning about these things, will most certainly question why he should support the protests against VAT on private education. He will be drawn into the argument that the rich people can afford to pay and that some rich schools are not paying their taxes.
Poor children, however, are not going to escape the VAT. The VAT is now being applied to ink cartridges. This will affect the rich and it will also affect the poor, but the effect on the poor will be more severe.
The price of printing documents will increase at this time since the stationery shops which usually do photocopying and printing of assignments will pass on the VAT on the ink to the children. The price of printing and photocopying will increase. This will affect poor students.
This is School-Based Assessment (SBA) season. There is a mad rush for students who are now completing their SBAs. The number of assignments which students have to submit is quite numerous and the cost of the printing and the photocopying will add to the miseries of parents who are already hurting from the fact that business activity is contracting in the country. Poor students are therefore going to be hit hard, because of the volume of SBAs which they will have to print.
The VAT will add up and reach thousands of dollars. Things are tight in the economy right now. People are trying hard to make ends meet. And the additional cost of printing and photocopying of documents will affect all students, and not just those doing their SBAs.
There is a new trend that is taking place in teaching. The Ministry of Education should look into this. It seems that children are being overloaded with assignments which require them to download and print pictures of various things. Some students are being asked to do this as many as three times per week. They are being asked to print stacks of images and information from off the internet.
It does seem as if all some teachers are doing is having the children do all the research and then printing up for the teacher to show that the homework was done.
Those students who have printers at home are able to do so easily. But think about the plight of a poor child who has no printer at all and whose teacher is warning him that unless he brings the printed images to school he will be penalized.
The poor child has to now go to an internet café, pay for internet time, and then pay to print the documents which he is required t0 submit to his teacher. This imposes a cost on the child’s parents. Now with VAT on printing ink, it would not be surprising if that cost goes up.
The government should clarify whether persons are required to pay VAT on ink cartridges. If they are not, then the government should issue a statement asking those who are charging VAT on ink cartridges to desist from this practice and refund their customers the VAT which may have been paid.
The Ministry of Education should discourage this practice of teachers – of asking students to print stuff off the internet. Students should be given text books which cover the syllabuses of the various subjects taught in school. These text books should have the images, so that poor children do not have to spend hundreds of dollars to print unnecessary assignments each week.

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