Leakages in the gold industry… GRA nets close to $3B from tax-evading landlords

Aug 23, 2018 News

For years, persons who own several land titles in the gold industry have been renting their lands to miners, while failing to pay a cent on their taxable income. But this irregular practice has finally come to an end.
According to the Guyana Revenue Authority (GRA), landlordism is an area that has been slipping under the radar while the nation has been losing billions of dollars in taxes. In fact, careful attention to this area for less than a year saw the authority raking in close to $3B.
Speaking with Kaieteur News on the matter, GRA’s Commissioner General, Godfrey Statia said, “In the gold industry there is rampant landlordism and there are different types of income that you would have to look at. This would include income from the sale of gold, income from landlords and other sources of income these miners and land owners may have.”
Statia continued, “So when you are looking at a miner, for example, you have to look at all their other sources of income, because they transfer, they shift around expenses from one business to the next…As for the landlords, you always have to be on the lookout. Moneys they (landlords) get from renting their mining lands are supposed to be taxed at 30 percent while miners’ income is taxed at two percent.”
The tax chief added, “We started looking at this in late 2016 early 2017. They were slipping under the radar, nobody was looking at it. People believe that in the gold industry, people (miners) just pay their two percent and they are done… so landlords were just getting away while we were losing billions. From 2017 to now we have collected billions, almost $3 billion.”
The Commissioner General said that this is an area the authority will continue to pursue aggressively.

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