JOHN ISSA, head of the SuperClubs hotel chain, has gone on about it for perhaps three decades. And he has been right.

For it is a fact that pay-as-you-earn (PAYE) employees, who represent relatively few of all the people who earn taxable income in Jamaica, carry a disproportionate portion of the country's tax burden. This fiscal year, for instance, income on individuals is expected to amount to $62.1 billion, or about a quarter of all tax collected by the Government. Of this amount, the PAYE worker will contribute more than 80 per cent. As a proportion of overall taxes, PAYE will contribute a fifth.

The reason for this, of course, is that it is easy to collect PAYE tax. It is just a matter of employers, usually firms registered with the Government, taking it from the salaries of their employees and remitting it to the tax authorities.

Bad tax-collecting habits

But as Mr Issa has been pointing out with almost boring persistence, including in a speech last week, it is all patently unfair. PAYE people persistently get the shaft because Jamaican governments, despite the usual grand declarations about doing better, remain notoriously bad at collecting taxes from other sources.

Just how bad was highlighted by Prime Minister Bruce Golding in his intervention in the Budget Debate last week. According to the prime minister, on average, customs duty collections, at five per cent of the value of imports, are well below what they ought to be.

In terms of corporate taxes, one per cent of the registered companies account for 75 per cent of corporate taxes. Or, looked at from the other end, 75 per cent of registered companies contribute only one per cent of the taxes paid. At the same time, the Government does not collect 80 per cent of the company taxes that should flow to its coffers, and half of all property taxes is not paid. Perhaps 250,000 self-employed or other workers who fall outside the PAYE frame should be paying taxes, but only 4,000 do.

Not at all complex

Audley Shaw, the finance minister, put it another way. He estimates that around $138 billion is owed to the Government in taxes. If interest and penalties are removed, that figure would be $59 billion, enough cash to cover the deficit in the Government's current budget and leave a surplus of $16 billion.

It need not be so, as Mr Shaw agrees. Indeed, he says he is going to do something about tax collection. And he should.

However, unlike Mr Shaw and his predecessor, Dr Omar Davies, we do not believe that collecting taxes should be all that difficult and complex.

Take the matter of company taxes, for which the compliance rate is under a fifth. Hundreds of companies are registered at Companies House. They have addresses and directors. It can't be difficult to track them down and tax audits done on them.

A matter of will

Failure to collect property taxes is another matter that baffles us. You cannot lift a piece of land or put up a house up and hide them. Moreover, Jamaica has a decent land titling and registry system. Ownership is easily traced.

The matter is similar with general consumption tax, which firms collect on behalf of the Government. It all, really, is a matter of will.