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Town Clerk with the required qualification

Jul 02, 2017 Letters

Dear Editor,
It is rather shocking and indeed disappointing that some very senior municipal officials of the Mayor and Councillors of the City of Georgetown are apparently ignorant of the difference between ‘General Rates’ and ‘Property Taxes’. The distinction is extremely important and should not be flippantly interchanged as it is particularly misleading.
For some time now the citizens of our capital city have been subjected to what is either the poor use of English Language, a deliberate act of deception or a complete lack of knowledge by persons who are in leadership positions at the City Council – who refer to general rates as rates and taxes.
At the moment, crude attempts are being made to embarrass defaulting property owners in the Garden City, in a reckless effort to force them to cough up scarce monies so that the fat cats at City Hall could continue on their spending binge of paying enormous salaries, doling out cash to contractors who were never subjected to transparent tender processes such as the Toilet Fiasco etc.
But as they rashly go down this self-serving path, someone needs to tell the Mayor, Councillors, the Town Clerk, the Public Relations Officer of the Council and the host of a ridiculous programme titled ‘Georgetown on the Move’ that general rates must never described as ‘property taxes.’
Such solecisms by municipal officials causes much confusion to property owners when they are confronted with property taxes which are leviable by the Commissioner of the Guyana Revenue Authority, on the total property of taxpayers which comes into consideration when the owner of landed property seeks to sell or transfer it to another, requiring the obtainment of a Certificate of Tax Compliance from the GRA.
The confusion arises when the seller of that landed property is being asked by the GRA to provide property tax return claims, which they quite wrongly believe that they have already paid to the city council whose officials quite inaccurately but colloquially refers to as ‘rates & taxes’ in their public statements rather than general rates. This is why the Council needs a Town Clerk with the requisite legal qualifications as specified in the job description of that position.
James McConnell

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