LaTanya Edwards, Tax Manager at Ernst and Young.
LaTanya Edwards, Tax Manager at Ernst and Young has also added her voice to the chorus of many and has agreed that we are facing very dire circumstances in Barbados.
While speaking last week at the Barbados Chamber of Commerce and Industry (BCCI) breakfast seminar, she remarked, “we need to retain some level of optimism, if we are going to get ourselves out of this, so whilst we can identify the challenges, we also need to identify the possible solutions. If we take it to a very simplistic level, reducing our expenses would be excellent of course, but is there anything we can do to increase the revenue of our government so we can do something about our economy in a positive way?”
One of the ways we have been hearing will help us increase revenue is tax... but what if our administration of tax was done differently? Is there anything we can do to make sure that the taxes that are due and payable currently, is there a way we can make sure that our administration collects the taxes that are due to the Government?
She pointed out, “in recent years we have been hearing from our Auditor General, situations where our revenue authority is not collecting all of the taxes due for various [reasons]. Chief among those are things like non-compliance, in some cases it is also tax evasion, and if we think about it on a global scale we have to do something about it. It is not only a problem Barbados faces. In 2010 the US took a hard stance against tax evasion and non-compliance and that is when they introduced FATCA. That was geared at encouraging United States citizens to pay their taxes that were due wherever they held accounts.
The OECD with conjunction with G20 and EU came up with the common reporting standard (CRS). The common reporting standard is an approach to ensure information is exchanged at a global level. We do that in Barbados through our double taxation treaties, but this is on request, though CRS seeks to make this information automatic.”
However, the Tax Manager warned, “one of the challenges Barbados is facing in adapting CRS – is time frame. This is already February, we are to begin reporting this year September and that means that the BRA will be automatically exchanging information with other jurisdictions. That has interesting scope for our financial institutions because we are still awaiting domestic regulations on CRS. Our institutions are still without the guidance they need to implement certain policies geared at making sure they gather the necessary information for reporting.
Therefore, if our competent authorities are exchanging information in September, then you would imagine that our financial institutions will need to provide that information in advance, but I have under good advisement that our regulations will be released soon, so we are hopeful that our financial institutions will be able to move swiftly along to make sure we are not in detriment when it comes to our early adoption stance.”
Edwards stressed, “your customers may be getting frustrated they have just come off of reporting to FATCA and now they have to give more information with CRS... .We of course want to encourage investors to come to Barbados and invest. We don’t want to frustrate them by these burdensome requirements for reporting, so maybe there is a way we can streamline the processes between FATCA and CRS. One of the chief concerns for the business community is that your customers don’t feel the process is confusing or burdensome. There may be a need that customers are fully aware, and the information they are asking from customers – they are not surprised as some of the information can be very detailed…”