Pay up your taxes!

04. APR.08

EDITOR: As a public servant and hard-working citizen who pays her fair share of taxes every month through the PAYE system, I have long been angry at the manner in which lawyers, doctors, dentists, accounts, and business people, get away with paying little or no taxes.{{more}}

I am now heartened by the public pronouncements by the Comptroller of Inland Revenue that he is going at the tax defaulters. I hope that this is not just another “grand charge”; that the authorities go at them hard, if need be in the civil and criminal courts. We must have tax equity; and those who make money must pay their fair share. The burden cannot be placed only on the working people who receive salaries and wages.

It sickens me that some very successful lawyers pay far less income tax than a stevedore, a police corporal, or an executive officer (that is two grades below Assistant Secretary). About three years or so ago, the Prime Minister revealed some appalling statistics about the small sums of money which some lawyers pay in income tax. There was a particular case in which a lawyer paid $360 in total for five years! And these people have the gall to talk about “human-rights”! Where are the “human rights” of the poor who cannot get more state assistance because these tax defaulters fail to pay their fair share of income taxes?

I hope that the Attorney-General and the Prime Minister support fully the Inland Revenue Department in ensuring justice in tax matters. Let us go first for the top hundred defaulters, then for the second hundred in swift time, and so on and so forth.

Beatrice Sutton