Stamp duty system needs reform
We are pleased that the House of Assembly has finally released the report completed by the stamp duty commission of inquiry more than two years ago. Now, government should be making every effort to implement the commission’s recommendations in order to resolve the systemic problems that cost the territory at least $3.4 million.
The document’s release is a long time in coming. In 2006, a report from the opposition-led Public Accounts Committee raised allegations of widespread underpayment of stamp duty.
The following year, then-Governor Boyd McCleary called for an inquiry, but the probe didn’t get under way for more than two years and it wasn’t completed until March 2010.
After that, then-Premier Ralph O’Neal refused to table to the commission’s report, complaining that two appendices had been redacted by the Governor’s Office.
Thus, for some six years after suspicions were raised, the community was kept in the dark about important questions of public interest.
The commission’s report does a good job of answering most of those questions. Encouragingly, the commission reported finding “no evidence of an intention to defraud, save perhaps in a single case.” Instead, the report painted a picture of an outdated stamp duty regime fraught with systemic problems that were responsible for large-scale losses in government revenue over time.
This scenario is not uncommon here: Frequently in the past three decades, government regulations and practices have been outpaced by the territory’s rapid growth and change.
Now that the failures in the stamp duty system have been identified, government should work toward reform with all possible haste. To that end, the commission recommended 21 administrative changes and 11 legislative changes, all of which seem sound.
Some of the recommended steps appear to amount to a thorough overhaul of the Inland Revenue Department’s system of collecting stamp duty. The report also advised making various updates to the Stamp Duty Act and the Non-Belongers Land Holding Regulations, among other recommendations.
Such steps are urgent, but they are not enough: The public, which was kept in the dark for far too long on this matter, should be regularly informed of the progress toward reform. Then residents can rest assured that the matter is being handled properly and efficiently.
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