Dear Editor,
Every person in this country pays taxes, whether at source through Pay As You Earn and education tax or National Insurance Scheme contributions, or through General Consumption Tax on goods and services. The only question, though, is are we really getting value for our money?
You have to sit down and really ponder this question. After thinking long and hard about it and making several observations, I have concluded that we don’t get value for our money as taxpayers. We don’t really see where the monies go.
Then the recently released auditor general’s reports have highlighted the wastage of taxpayers’ money with little or no accountability for it. You hear of the staggering billions of dollars of money spent with no successes to show.
Currently we have a tax on gas that we buy and the money is transferred to the Road Maintenance Fund to fix roads, but when you look throughout the country many roads are in dire need of repair. Also, at a recent parliamentary committee meeting the local government minister was making contributions on a street light audit that was done and how much money they, the Government, owes Jamaica Public Service (JPS). He concluded that you can’t do a street light audit during the day to see whether or not they are working properly; you have to do it at night to get the real picture. He was absolutely right about that. Had that audit been done during the night, they would have seen that many street lights are, in fact, not working.
So how is it that we as taxpayers have to pay the Government millions of dollars to pay JPS for street lights when many communities don’t have proper working street lights or adequate numbers of them. So when we pay that money in tax and don’t have light, and the Government has this massive debt to JPS, where does our money really go?
As a concerned citizen, I would want politicians to be held more accountable for taxpayers’ money. Plus, the auditor general should be given more power.
Brandon McNeil
brandon-mcneil@hotmail.com
Every person in this country pays taxes, whether at source through Pay As You Earn and education tax or National Insurance Scheme contributions, or through General Consumption Tax on goods and services. The only question, though, is are we really getting value for our money?
You have to sit down and really ponder this question. After thinking long and hard about it and making several observations, I have concluded that we don’t get value for our money as taxpayers. We don’t really see where the monies go.
Then the recently released auditor general’s reports have highlighted the wastage of taxpayers’ money with little or no accountability for it. You hear of the staggering billions of dollars of money spent with no successes to show.
Currently we have a tax on gas that we buy and the money is transferred to the Road Maintenance Fund to fix roads, but when you look throughout the country many roads are in dire need of repair. Also, at a recent parliamentary committee meeting the local government minister was making contributions on a street light audit that was done and how much money they, the Government, owes Jamaica Public Service (JPS). He concluded that you can’t do a street light audit during the day to see whether or not they are working properly; you have to do it at night to get the real picture. He was absolutely right about that. Had that audit been done during the night, they would have seen that many street lights are, in fact, not working.
So how is it that we as taxpayers have to pay the Government millions of dollars to pay JPS for street lights when many communities don’t have proper working street lights or adequate numbers of them. So when we pay that money in tax and don’t have light, and the Government has this massive debt to JPS, where does our money really go?
As a concerned citizen, I would want politicians to be held more accountable for taxpayers’ money. Plus, the auditor general should be given more power.
Brandon McNeil
brandon-mcneil@hotmail.com