KINGSTON (JIS) -- Tax Administration Jamaica (TAJ) has reported increased compliance since the implementation of its Revenue Administration Information System (RAiS) earlier this year. Commissioner General of TAJ, Ainsley Powell, told JIS News that the new system allows TAJ to treat with delinquent taxpayers, based on their risk level. “We have a feature that we refer to as our compliance management feature that allows us to rank, by profiling delinquent taxpayers and move them up the line for compliance action. [They] first get a call from the call centre, if there is no response they will be contacted by a compliance officer and after a visit is made,” he explained.
Mr. Powell also said that there has been “significant improvement in arrears collection from the activities monitored on the system.”
Since the implementation of Phase One in February, TAJ records have indicated that the agency earned over $140 billion or 103 per cent of its revenue target.
The Commissioner General outlined that in addition to using RAiS, the TAJ uses other methods to track delinquent clients.
“With the discovery module, we will be looking at different sets of data and we will be searching through that to determine persons who ought to be in the net. We have already started that with some of the legacy [older] systems,” he said.
“There is now a programme that looks at third party information and the team in the different offices are now contacting persons who we have identified, who ought to have filed returns and are not registered or if they are registered and not filing. We are going to pick up steam with that next year,” Mr. Powell said.
Another method that the TAJ has utilised to improve compliance is issuing one notice to clients with all tax types, instead of issuing several notices for each tax type, as was the case before the introduction of RAiS.
The RAiS project began in May 2014, with Phase One implemented in February 2015 and Phase two in December. It is expected that the project will be fully rolled out in June 2016.