Committee: No proper records on tax incentives

 THE Tax Review Committee believes that there were no proper records kept by government agencies on incentives collected by the government. 

A committee member, Lady Aivu Tauvasa said the committee was faced with the challenge when working on reviewing the current PNG tax regime. 

“We are beginning to appreciate that there is no one government department or entity or unit that keeps those incentives.

“In fact, we don’t believe that there is proper recording.

“The exercise of trying to find out who issues what incentives to which industries and what effect of those incentives are and the flow on effects of that onto the ordinary Papua New Guineans is something we have to find out first,” Lady Aivu said. 

“We’ve had some initial positive discussions with the National Planning and Monitoring Department because we understand they hold some of the “basket” of incentives.

“But for us as a committee and what I think the government would have appreciated is that we need to understand everything about the incentives first.

“Who has issued what over the past 39 years when we got independence, how effective those incentives are, not just at the national level but at the provincial level and at the district level,” she said.