The spending proposal “needed more work” according to the UK foreign office on both the revenue and expenditure side, administration sources said.
The government spending plan would have needed to be revamped at any rate, following an announcement Monday by Cayman Islands Premier McKeeva Bush that a major source of revenue within the budget – a 10 per cent payroll tax on expatriate workers earning more than $36,000 per year – was being withdrawn.
A press release issued Monday evening by the premier’s office confirmed reports over the past weekend that the controversial tax is dead.
“The community enhancement fee is now off the table and will not be implemented,” Mr. Bush said in the short statement. “At our public meeting on Wednesday, 1 August at John Cumber Primary School Hall, I stated that the Community Enhancement Fee would be taken off the table if robust, credible and sustainable revenue that did not hurt the poorest members of our islands was found.
“We are satisfied that many of the commitments from the private sector will meet these criteria.”
Precisely what those revenue proposals might be was unknown. Mr. Bush was due to appear at a public meeting in George Town Wednesday night to go over the administration’s proposals in more detail.
The UK response to the budget plan also sought a significant amount of expenditure cuts, according to sources.
Please see the full story in Wednesday’s Caymanian Compass…
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The heck with new revenue, the government is a bottomless pit you will never be able to fill up. Stop spending/wasting more and more money every year and the problem goes away.
What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate. Unfortunately, instead of Cool Hand Luke we have placed Dragline in charge of our future.
After all that drama the U.K. rejects McKeeva’s budget as needing more work. The members of this government must feel the same chill they felt on the Titanic.