New Tax Admin System to Process Personal and Company Taxes

The administration of personal income tax, company tax and withholding tax will now be processed using a new Tax Administration Computer System.

The newly acquired system was launched today (Wednesday, April 25) at the MCRS Conference Room at the Government Headquarters in Brades.

The system, which is designed to improve the processing times for annual tax returns was developed by the MCRS in collaboration with Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) in the United Kingdom, with funding and support from the Department for International Development (DFID), and support from the Department for Information Technology and E-Government Services (DITES).

Speaking at the launch ceremony, MCRS Director General, Mr. Peter W. A. White said, “This is a big movement for us. A lot of work has been done behind the scenes to ensure we are more efficient so we can achieve our targets”.

Stakeholders involved in the systems development also expressed their satisfaction with new system and the progress being made to improve the efficiency of services within the Government of Montserrat.

The Honourable Financial Secretary, Colin Owen in his remarks, described the new system as a “massive improvement”. He said, “It is part of a package where the Ministry of Finance is looking to use IT to have much more efficient process and systems, and DITES is certainly involved in that process.”

The new system replaces the manual, time consuming process of sifting through printed files and paperwork to complete the assessments.

Comptroller, Inland Revue Department, Mrs. Violet Silcott described the old manual system which used a lot of paper as “overwhelming’ and highlighted some of the benefits of the new system. She said, “The new system will be used for assessments for income year 2017. With this new system we will be able to assist tax payers from our desk…with just a click of a button, we will be able to see all the records of the taxpayers information.”

She noted that taxpayers information which were stored manually, has now been scanned into the system. However, Mrs. Silcott said the manual files will still be kept as a backup.

The Senior Economist at the Department for International Development (DFID), Sahilaja Annamraju stated that the new system is a good example of Montserrat delivering against the public service empowering excellence programme.

Other benefits of the new system include, faster processing of returns; enhanced file management system; reduction in the amount of paper used and increase response times to certain queries.