PHILIPSBURG:--- Grant Thornton St. Maarten presented its latest publication of the Fiscal Lawbook 2021
"Fiscale Wetgeving 2021" to the Minister of Finance of St. Maarten, Mr. Ardwell Irion. The publication was handed over by Paul van Vliet, Tax Partner, and Herbert Beldman, Partner Assurance & Advisory Grant Thornton. The firm has been publishing an overview of current and relevant tax laws of Aruba, the BES islands, Curaçao and St. Maarten for more than 10 years now.
Ambitious organizations need to consider their tax affairs carefully, to gain trust and stay ahead of their competitors. In our local market many entrepreneurs, investors, and individuals operate in several parts of the Dutch Kingdom in the Caribbean. With all the annual changes, it remains a challenge even for tax experts to have all the tax laws available in one place in our region. With the annual release of an up-to-date edition of tax legislation, we try to accommodate this. In addition, our ambition is to have publications like this available that can help our clients and society broaden their knowledge, so they can go beyond “business as usual”. The return of the publication fits this objective well and the publication will also be available online free of charge.
This year, the most important fiscal changes for the island of Aruba are the provisional support measures due to the Corona pandemic and the introduction of the substance requirements for companies that perform exempt activities and companies that are taxed at the rate of 10%. Moreover, Aruba introduced the “Burgerlijk Wetboek Aruba boek 2” on 1 January 2021, and therefore, it’s no longer possible to establish Aruba tax-exempted companies in Aruba starting from 1 January 2021. In Curaçao, there were only slight changes as per 1 January 2021, except for the major changes in the area of sales tax as per 1 January 2020. The scheduled replacement for sales tax by the General Expenditure Tax (“Algemene Bestedingsbelasting” (ABB) in 2020 has been postponed till further notice in 2021. In addition, just like previous years, there have been many minor changes across all islands too, amongst other, fiscal tariffs.
The Fiscal law bundles can be bought at the reception of the Grant Thornton office for $40.
