With our national debt expected to reach $10 billion in July this year, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Finance, Professor Biman Prasad says his agenda is cut out because the former Minister for Economy, Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum has left a big mess.
In an interview with fijivillage News, Professor Prasad says they are discovering massive wasteful expenditure such as building physical infrastructure when it was not needed.
He says an example is building three police stations and the Navosa Hospital.
The Finance Minister asks was that a priority as we could have had a few ambulances, put some money out of the $38 million to the Sigatoka Hospital and improved the facilities there, and invested another $20 million at the CWM Hospital.
Professor Prasad says you look at the condition of the CWM Hospital, all the health expenditure, and asks where has it gone.
He says we have one of the worst health services ever in the history of this country.
The economist says they are also still struggling to find a way with the public private partnership with Aspen, and announcements will be made soon.
Professor Prasad further says there was wasteful expenditure in Local Government.
He says more than $60 million is being owed by ratepayers and all these years we have heard that the town and city councils are running very well.
The Finance Minister says Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum’s government tried to look after Local Government affairs and look at the massive blunder in terms of not being able to collect rates so the government is now being forced to even pay salaries of CEOs of town and city councils because they can’t raise revenue.
He says it is run by administrators who have no incentives.
Professor Prasad says when we had elected councillors, it was like a parliament, you had government and opposition, you had wards, and councillors who looked after the services like roads in the town council boundaries.
He asks what is Sayed-Khaiyum talking about when attacking the coalition government’s policies.
He also asks where has all the work regarding digitalisation and e-governance gone as there is nothing much to show on the ground.
Professor Prasad says the coalition government got rid of Qorvis and Vatis, which was just wastage of taxpayers funds.
He also says all the tax policies are all over the place – and they have a massive amount of work to do to rationalise all of this and to make sure that they have a balance.
The Finance Minister says there are important principles of taxation which the former Economy Minister probably does not know, and two of the most important principles of a tax system is administrative simplicity and one that is economically efficient amongst others
He also says he is not here to make changes willy nilly as they will keep good policies and improve on them.
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