By YOURI KEMP

Tribune Business Reporter

ykemp@tribunemedia.net

THE acting director of the Department of Inland Revenue (DIR) said the agency is $100m over its revenue target for the current fiscal year.

Shunda Strachan, speaking at the weekly press conference at the Office of The Prime Minister, said that the department has collected $930m over the current fiscal year compared to the $830m it had been projected to collect.

The government collected $136m from real property tax, $712m from Value Added Tax (VAT) and an additional $81m from business license taxes.

The DIR is “actively” following up with people who may be in arrears with their real property taxes or other taxes to encourage them to come in and pay their taxes if they do not know that they owe the government.

She also said: “So our goal is to get the never payers to pay, to get the sometimes payers to become consistent payers and that is working.”

From the “never payers” brackets the government has received $47m alone.

Ms Strachan also said: “The fact that we're over projections, tells us that persons are hearing the cry of the government that they need to pay their taxes, and persons are paying.”

She continued, “So even when you look at real property tax. When we look at the categories and we have four categories: We have owner occupied taxpayers; residential taxpayers; the foreign owned vacant land owners VAT category, and, of course, the commercial bucket.

She added: “The owner occupied property owners have really surpassed our budget figures and they are the ones that are really coming forward and meeting their obligations.”

Out of the $136m in real property taxes about $95m was from “current taxpayers” that have been consistent over the years.

One of the important changes to the real property tax regime is the cap has been lifted and now anyone with an owner occupied property over $8m will now have to pay $120,000 per year rather than the cap at $60,000 at $6m and up. From this the DIR is looking to rake in a considerable amount of revenue in the next fiscal year.