Revenue Appeals Division On Target To Meet Goal

The Revenue Appeals Division (RAD) in the Ministry of Finance and the Public Service is on target to meet its case turnaround time goal in 2022.

This information was shared by the Commissioner of Revenue Appeals, Dr. Deloree Staple-Chambers, during the premiere of the RAD’s 5^th Anniversary Documentary on June 16.

Along with the reduction in case backlog, the RAD had targeted its case turnaround time as one of the areas for improvement through its medium-term strategic initiatives covering the financial years 2017/18 to 2019/20.

“The organisation’s vision is to achieve, by 2022, a case turnaround time of six to nine months, matching that of international best practice. Where we are now is where we want to be, meaning, as a case comes into the RAD it is assigned to an officer. We can now guarantee the standard that the case will be heard within 90 days of submission,” Dr. Staple-Chambers said.

“Before the project we could not do that. We are now living up to the standard of countries like Singapore and Canada, which have those kinds of standards,” she added.

The Commissioner noted that prior to the targeted improvements, cases sometimes took up to three years to be assigned to an officer.

Additionally, in a July 2020 JIS ‘Think Tank’, Dr. Staple-Chambers shared that the RAD was at 25 per cent in meeting the target of hearing 90 per cent of its cases within 180 days of submission.

She said that between the 2015/16 and 2019/20 financial years, the Division managed 550 cases and closed 407 of that number. Since then, the RAD has reduced that number significantly.

“At the end of the last fiscal year, we closed with 68 cases, and we continue to try to ensure that no case stays in the Division longer than nine months. That’s the target, but the real vision is to turn around cases in six months. That index can only be achieved where the parties are also contributing to that,” she said.

The RAD’s fifth anniversary documentary covers the Division’s creation as the successor of the Taxpayer Appeals Department, recommendations from the International Monetary Fund’s assessment of tax administration in Jamaica, changes implemented in the last five years and the subsequent results, and the experiences of some stakeholder interactions with the RAD.

The documentary is one of the Division’s activities to mark its fifth anniversary, along with the planned introduction of online filing of appeals.

The Commissioner said that the Division is committed to further improvements to its processes.

“Going forward, the Revenue Appeals Division plans on continuing the improvement of business processes and efficiency gains that we have made. Additionally, we will continue to learn by embarking on a rigorous programme of training and development for our revenue appeals officers. This is to ensure that we continue to learn and we stay ahead in terms of the dynamic changes that do occur from time to time in the tax environment,” Dr. Staple-Chambers said.