Dear Editor,
I am convinced that the people of this country no longer should allow this coalition government to handle the affairs of the Ministry of Finance. The breaking point for me to come to this conclusion was what I saw and heard during the parliament meeting on December 12th, 2013, said meeting was attended by the Minister of Finance. When, parliamentarians, who are supporting this coalition, can come up with a feckless motion that will be detrimental to the financial survivability of this country.
Good corporate citizens of this country, must speak out and speak out firmly against such irresponsible actions. In this motion these parliamentarians, who signed off on it, are instructing the Minister of Finance to prepare legislation to write off taxes owed to government by businesses and individuals from 2006 to 2010. We are talking here about taxes that are recently owed to government. These are not taxes that should fall in category of "non collectable". This part of their motion is all about assisting unscrupulous persons who have not lived up to their civil duty and pay the taxes that they are to pay and should be able to pay. This is about rewarding bad and punishing good. This, same group of persons have already been rewarded by the former minister of finance, when he wrote off back taxes up until 2006. But this coalition is not satisfied with that, they find that that reward was not good enough, they are telling these tax evaders, we are not going to have you pay any taxes notwithstanding the precarious financial situation of this country. Most probably when you look around and check, the majority of these persons who will benefit from this tax write off are persons who live in big homes, drive the most expensive vehicles, vacation twice a year, have their children attend private schools and have hefty bank accounts abroad. But that does not bother these parliamentarians, as long as they too can benefit from it indirectly.
Since they are playing Santa Clause, I have a few questions for those parliamentarians who signed off on the motion. What about the residents of this country who year in year out lived up to their civil duty and paid their taxes? How are you going to reward these persons for being good co-operate citizens? Will they be allowed to receive a 50% reduction of their taxes over the year 2014? Don't you all believe in doing the right thing? To get back to the Ministry of Finance, this ministry is not doing a good job. It can't be so that the economy of this country is growing and revenues of government are not increasing. We have here a situation where the country is rich and the government is poor, and for me this has all to do with the quality of the Ministry of Finance and of course those unscrupulous tax evaders. If we have a good functioning Ministry of Finance, we will have a good functioning inspectorate of taxes and an effective collection of taxes. And those tax evaders should become something of the past. To avoid this country from falling into a financial debacle, that can have devastating consequences for the residents of this country, the quality of the Ministry of Finance has to be upgraded immediately. A plan of approach will not be the answer to this problem. That will take too long. What is needed here is immediate assistance from the Netherlands in the form of human resources which should book immediate positive results. If, this can only be done through a process of an instruction to the Ministry of Finance, as difficult as it may be to accept, it should be done in the interest of the people of this country. Both the Government of St. Maarten and the Netherlands should not diddle around with this issue.
And by the way it is mentioned through the grape-vine that this tax write off is all about assisting a family member of one of the parliamentarians who signed off on the motion and who owes a large sum in taxes. And we still don't want the Dutch to carry out their integrity investigation.
Todd PETERSON