GRA sends lawyer’s letter to City Hall over $1.4B owed in taxes

Sep 13, 2023 News

Kaieteur News – The Georgetown Mayor and City Council (M&CC) and the Guyana Revenue Authority (GRA) continue to be at odds over $1.4 billion owed in taxes.

The issue was raised at the Council’s Statutory Meeting held on Monday.

At the meeting, the M&CC was informed that the GRA sent a lawyer’s letter demanding the outstanding payments for Pay-As-You-Earn-Tax (PAYE) amounting to a total of $ 1.4 billion to be paid.

According to the Council, the amount was derived through an accumulation between the periods of 2016 to 2022 since PAYE deductions were made but never remitted to GRA.

City Mayor Alfred Mentore told Kaieteur News that the Council had made attempts previously to address the matter.

He explained: “We’ve attempted to address the matter by putting a quid pro quo arrangement in place because the government owes the Council taxes as well, so we had suggested that the Government pays us what they owe and we can give them a cheque with the difference and in that way we could easily meet a settlement.”

City Mayor, Alfred Mentore

As it stands, Mentore said there is hope that the Council will meet with the central government on the matter.

“As I said before, we had the matter on the agenda of the previous council but those talks collapsed sometime during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, we are still hopeful that we can come to sort of agreement, so we are laying the card out on the table to see where we stand,” Mentore said noting that “This has become a legal issue so we have also engaged our lawyer on the matter.”

Kaieteur News had previously reported that City Hall owes over $5B in debt to the National Insurance Scheme (NIS), Guyana Revenue Authority (GRA) and the Guyana Water Inc. (GWI) combined.

Under the previous Council, Town Clerk (ag.) Candace Nelson had pointed to a bill of $600,000 which was requested by a lawyer after he drafted a letter on behalf of the former Town Clerk.

Nelson reported, “We owe like $100M to garbage collection contractors; $400M to the National Insurance Scheme (NIS) and over $20M in retroactive salaries among the liabilities.”

Similarly, then-Mayor Ubraj Narine sought to address reports about the Council’s debt. He said: “I asked government to let us go through the liabilities together so that they can have their input in the situation to help better manage the liabilities of the municipality,” Narine added.

In addition to debt, the former Mayor said the Council has been struggling to pay staffers due to a 78 percent decrease in revenue earnings during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Our revenue drop is about 78 percent. We are actually struggling to pay staffers. Our salary and wages scale is $120M per month. We owe NIS over $400M since 1993. We have been struggling to deal with that issue,” he said.

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Alfred Mentore, City Mayor, Georgetown Mayor and City Council (M&CC), Guyana Revenue Authority (GRA), taxes

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