As Minister of Finance, the Prime Minister has direct responsibility for the Customs Department. And you would think he has taken sharp note of our recent story suggesting that Customs officers are cutting into government revenue by working through brokers who charge car importers up to 60 percent more in kickbacks than what is actually paid in duty.
The story caused a major buzz when we broke it two days ago but the PM says he just heard about it - and said that the person heard on the recording demanding his money back needs to go to the DPP. He spoke also about the broader policy push behind a switch to a new system of valuing imported used and salvage title vehicles:
John Briceno, Prime Minister
"No, I'm not aware of it, I just heard about it. But like what I'm told, what I said to the media when it comes to the police officer Pou that he said he had evidence, I told him he needs to go to the DPP, this gentleman needs to go to the DPP or to the police and lodge a formal complaint so that we can deal with it. We are trying to fix that problem. Over a year ago, we were changing car dealers or anybody, when they bring in their cars, they bring like a bill of sale and not bring an actual document that shows what they paid for it and so we change the law back then to ensure they have to do that. Last year there was a great uproar from the car dealers, they said they were not given enough notice to be able to prepare. Well we have given them more than a year's notice, we started to implement but it does not end there because there are two things we have to look at. One is to be able to start to encourage newer vehicles to come in so we have to be able to reduce, look at how we can reduce the taxes on the newer vehicles that would be able to last longer in Belize, trying to see how we can discourage salvage vehicles to come here, salvage vehicles cannot run in the US and most countries in Central America and the Caribbean do not allow salvage vehicle to come into their countries."
"We need to ensure that we can protect our consumers so we need to look at how we can better regulate that, reduce the tax and remove the subjectivity of custom officers. It's already started because one or two colleagues have asked me if we could help and they said no you can't, that's the law, that's the tax. We want to be able to be open, fair, transparent to everyone and to ensure we can collect the taxes for the Belizean people but at the same time we have to go back to Cabinet to look at the tax rates and probably bring it down a little bit to encourage newer vehicles to come in to Belize."
And while the PM dodged the issue of the kickback customs Brokers, we will continue to follow up on it.
