Dear Editor,

Social welfare was originally designed by governments within various countries to provide some form of financial assistance or bridge to the less fortunate citizens, in order to allow them to be able to have access to fundamental and essential services such as health care and education.

However, unscrupulous wealthy and bourgeois persons — such as those in Jamaica — have been bombarding these social welfares for decades, in an effort to satisfy their insatiable appetite of stocking up their wealth at the expense of the poor and vulnerable. This simultaneously defeats the true purpose of those social welfare programmes, which is to locate and assist the poor and vulnerable of society; since those who can more than afford to pay are continually taking up the limited space available for the less fortunate.

After reading someone’s Facebook post on “user fee”, a thought suddenly came to my head about how we can alleviate the problem of this Government not being able to pay for the free health care and tuition fee for the less fortunate. Since every citizen in Jamaica has a national ID/passport/driver’s licence and a Taxpayer Registration Number (TRN), then the Government should enact a law to facilitate the creation of a ‘Citizens Who Can or Cannot Pay (CWCCP)’ database to collect and securely store wealth information on every citizen in Jamaica.

The enactment of the CWCCP Act would make it mandatory for ALL financial institutions and the Tax Administration Department to provide an automatic computer generated label on every citizen via his/her TRN AND Government ID to the CWCCP database — which would be managed by an external entity called the CWCCP Authority. The label of the citizens’ wealth or lack of wealth to the database would be in the form of ‘Can Pay’ or ‘Cannot Pay’. This kind of labelling is extremely important in order to prevent financial institutions from having to provide the CWCCP database with dollar figure information on account holders. Financial institutions’ role in the CWCCP Act would be to keep track of the affordability of citizens who are not paying taxes, while the Tax Administration Department’s role would be to keep track of the affordability of citizens who are paying business and employee taxes.

Now, as soon as the CWCCP Act and Authority have been established, and all the relevant information on citizens collected and stored in the database, then the system would function as follows:

(1) Every citizen is required to take his/her TRN and Government ID with him/her when attending school, hospital, etc to do business. Those who forget or refuse to bring the required documents would be denied access to the social welfare benefits, and thus required to pay upfront.

(2) The staff of the institution attending to that citizen will ask for the citizen’s required documents, and enter the TRN into the CWCCP shared database, after examining the Government ID to ensure that the person presenting the ID is in fact the person on that ID.

(3) Based on the label — Can Pay or Cannot Pay –that is displaced on the CWCCP database for that citizen after his/her TRN is entered, then that citizen would be made to either pay or enjoy the social welfare benefits for the service he/she seeks. If the citizen requiring the service is a minor, then the parents or guardian for the minor would have to provide their TRN AND Government ID instead.

With all the above said, this CWCCP database can also play a significant role in getting every qualified citizen to be a part of the tax net by aggressively going after and penalising those citizens who have a ‘Can Pay’ label in the CWCCP database but are not found paying their taxes on the Tax Administration Department system.

I am confident that if my proposed system is given some thought and implemented, we will be able to put a serious and effective dent in the decade-long issues of tax compliance and social welfare abuse.

Garth ‘Sub-Zero’ Allen

excellentsub@hotmail.com