Labour Minister Leroy Baptiste said there was no evidence that semi-autonomous institutions such as the TT Revenue Authority (TTRA) made a difference to revenue collection. He said the long-lamented inefficiency of the Internal Revenue and Customs and Excise Divisions were caused by deliberate mismanagement by the previous administration.

Speaking during his maiden contribution to the Senate during debate on the TTRA repeal bill on June 27, Baptiste said the previous government had based the need for the TTRA on a false equivalence that having the entity meant that more revenue would be collected. He said the PNM has consistently stated that there is a revenue gap of $10 billion based on various reports.

He quoted the 2009 Kidd and Crandall report on the TTRA, which found “no consistent evidence that the creation of a revenue authority leads to increased revenue performance. Improvements stemmed from unrelated reforms or short-term gains that later eroded. There is no objective analysis showing that countries with revenue authorities outperformed countries without them.”