Since Tuesday, you've been hearing the complaints of Belmopan business owners about the sharp increase in Trade License fees. The mayor has since publicly acknowledged his error in implementing the change before the new law could be finalized. According to UDP's Belmopan caretaker, Khalid Belisle and the Director of Local Government, that law has not been ratified by the Senate.
However, Senator Glenfield Dennison clarified that saying that it indeed passed through the Senate. He explained, though, that he had pointed out the very same issues the Belmopan Council found itself with.
Glenfield Dennison, Union Senator
"What I think it is was an attempt to regularize the differences between people paying different rates of taxes so if you look at the section, it tried to find an objective criteria in order to charge the trade licensing on and what the government came up with was to use square footage in relation to businesses that are brick and mortar. So I think it's section 20 that says it's the minister who is supposed to declare rates per square footage based on their classification of businesses. That hasn't been done to my knowledge."
"But that I want to clear up is that the law is in fact passed, it's not stuck at the Senate, and in fact when they had first passed the law in 2024 they had put a date of first of January 2025, and I remember when the brought that amendment to the Senate, I said to them, this is bad drafting style because this date will come that you're changing it to, it will go and you won't know if you put a static date if you can meet that deadline. I was told they will meet the October deadline, October came and they weren't able to meet it and so they did exactly what I had told them to do the first time which was to declare that it would come into force on a date to be appointed by the minister by order published in the Gazette. And so that's where we are. The law is passed, it's just not in effect yet because the minister needs to do a declaration of commencement."
Dennison added that in the case of those seeing 300 - 700 percent increases, it's likely because they were underpaying with the previous calculation method. Here's how he explained it.
Glenfield Dennison, Union Senator
"Business owners corrupt the system by trying to get a declaration of tax that is either at a lower rate or at lower square footage than what their business is reflecting and so when you have that sort of ability to do that discretion, that's where corruption comes into play so you would have rightly had two storeowners side by side, same amount of square footage, same building type, same business type and one is paying a lower rate because well he paid under the table, I'm saying this raw, he paid under the table when the next person refused to do that but they would be paying the tax as the normal rate so you had that discrepancy.So when you tried to regularize now it looks like a 700% or a 300% increase on the one who was paying lower but to me it's just a regularization of it and that's why the objective criteria is important for using square footage because it's just a formula, you measure how much is your square footage and times it by the appropriate amount and that's your tax rate, I think that's a better system."
