I like how people are only suggesting he resign...he's admitted to not paying it, he should be brought up before the courts and charged...and have his house re-evaluated at the proper rate.

Yeap...be careful the path you tread!! Better be squeaky clean and 100% covered if you are going to start making noise. My gut tells me that there is more truth in the Punch than there is truth in the BoB's statements. Very slippery slope.

...and he is just the TIP of the iceberg of people who have not paid their bills...I love how he says it 'gives him angst'...I guess that will suffice...it's all good now, continue with your non-payment of your due taxes and carry on with pushing taxes on those that will pay it. ten years!! He claims he has not paid the tax because of his financial position...but wants to RAISE taxes...because he knows he's not going to pay any new tax either!!

Tax the churches!!

Religion down here is simply a money machine and a tax dodge. They are almost worse than the government taking the poorest of individuals last dollar for the church, because god and the church shall provide...bull crap.

Or you could do something REALLY radical and do an income tax that is light on the poor and heavy on the rich...seems like governments around the world have a problem mastering that and leave loop hole after loop hole for the rich to dodge the tax. Tax the dang churches and see how fast the debt gets paid!!

You pretty much hit the nail on the head their John...and the price increases that everyone is seeing and complaining about at the moment is a direct result of increased customs processing fees and increased business license fees that have come on line in the past 12-18 months, just to name a few...VAT will just compound these already major cost increases.

ROTFL...but crying at the same time...

We will also be the first country in the world to try to implement VAT that does not already have a well established income tax and revenue agency in place...so moving into the more complex VAT was not such a major undertaking...but NOOOO...we can do it so much better here in the Bahamas, we can bypass one of the primary tax structures that governments depend on, income tax and sales tax, which are relatively simple, to the most complex of VAT...forget baby steps, let's just whack people over the head with a 2x4.

"running out"...try 'RUN OUT'...there is absolutely ZERO chance that the people who are going to bear the brunt of trying to come to terms with this, get all their systems in place, figure out the accounting and reporting side of things to do this effectively without getting whacked by this new enforcement agency is ZILCH. This is not something that you can turn around on July 1st and say to people who are not ready...oh that's OK...we will overlook it for a short period of time until you figure it out. NO...this has to be fully documented and fully explained, and fully tested before a go live takes place...every single business that will fall into the VAT scheme must be up to speed and ready...they haven't even given us any rock hard information on it yet so we can in turn hand that off to our software vendors to make things happen...and that's just for businesses that run a full blown accounting software in conjunction with their point of sales...all the people out there still running manual cash registers are in deep crap!! Not ready, no where near!!