It is not expected that former Prime Minister Musa will be arrested tomorrow if and when he attends a House sitting in Belmopan. Still he may have to suffer some parliamentary daggers as hefty volumes of audit reports for the fiscal years from 2003 to 2008 will be tabled. We are told that the reports make some fairly condemnatory assessments of expenditure, revenue and debt figures presented by Musa when he was Minister of Finance.
And while those audit reports are one thing, the biggest business tomorrow is the proposed amendment to the Income and Business Tax Act to provide for an increase on the taxation of BTL. The news tonight is that the Bill will only be presented for its first reading.
Most times revenue measures are pushed through all three readings in one day and become law by the following week. But this time, government has taken the decision to leave it to go through the full process of consultation, which means it will go to its respective committee for public input. This approach has been taken, we gather, after the Government met with BTL’s local managers who pleaded their case and asked the Prime Minister to hold off on implementing the tax.
Tune in tomorrow night for full coverage of the House meeting.
