2018/19 Budget Communication 2018_2019 BUDGET COMMUNICATION | Page 106

would have only made a bad situation worse. The country’s
bond rating is at junk status. The reason for that is because
others before us failed to act promptly and judiciously. But
worse than the junk status, the penalty for inaction is a
continued quickening crawl toward a fiscal point of no
return.
And as we have seen, when countries hit crisis
mode, the path to correction is extraordinarily hard and
painful.
In the Budget, we could have pretended that this
time, we could collect all the uncollected and under-
collected taxes in a few weeks and months.
But, we
recognize that while we must improve our tax yield on
existing taxes immediately – which is why we are
institutionalizing the Revenue Enhancement Unit – we
understand that, to realistically improve our capacity to
collect all of our taxes, is a multi-year project given the
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