The tax threshold of ordinary workers will be raised from the current K10 000 to K20 000, says Prime Minister Peter O’Neill .
He said workers currently earning K1 to K10,000 are exempted from paying any taxes and that can be increased to K20,000 threshold after the review team comes in with its recommendations. But there is a catch here. Before doing that the Government needs to increase its revenue base to cater for any further tax relief to the ordinary workers, he said The PM said the current taxation review headed by Sir Nagora Bogan will consider all these taxation issues and tighten up loopholes that allows tax evasion by business houses. Speaking on FM100’s Talk-back show yesterday, the Prime Minister encouraged all young Papua New Guineans to go into the "savings culture" to save for the future. "The tax review team headed by Sir Nagora is already in place and I know that we have given tax relief to workers earning money from K1 to K10,000 per annum," he said. "Yes we can increase it a little bit further; I think there is a need to increase that say an increase of up to K20,000 where Papua New Guineans earning up to K20,000 cannot pay tax. "I want to stress this very carefully I know that the tax we are paying is fairly high, the only way we can reduce the tax is when the government has got a bigger revenue base. "There are some people who are in business out there who are deliberately avoiding paying tax and we need to catch them, not the mums and dads and kids who are working but there are some business people who are making millions of kina are not paying their fair share of the tax. "What we are now doing is changing the rules saying that if you are going to open up a company account in the bank or wherever you must have a tax file number, if you want to transfer money out of the country you must have a tax clearance first before you do that." He said a lot of people doing business are involved in activities such as transfer pricing where they buy high invoices overseas and send their money out but sell at low cost in the country to avoid paying tax. "We are now tightening up the way in registering and doing business in the country so as to capture everybody, some companies have been making loses for many years but are still operating, so those kind of people we will do tax audits, go back and reassess the value of their taxes over the last few years, so we will go back and governments can do that, they think they are smart now but we will catch up with them." "So we are tightening up all the loopholes so that every person living and working in this country pay their fair share of tax so we can build better roads, better infrastructure to benefit the whole lot of us." PNG Facts/ Post Courier Comments are closed.
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