The Minister and his CEO showed up at the meeting, which lasted about three hours, and by the time they walked out, it seemed that tensions had eased a bit. Fonseca explained that they went through each point and came to certain agreements.

Francis Fonseca, Minister of Education
"I think we had a very productive meeting, a very positive meeting, I think we brought not only representatives of the Ministry of Education but we also made sure we brought people from the Accountant General's Office, the Treasury Department, we brought our finance unit members because most of these issues as you will appreciate has to do with finance so we went through each issue one at a time, we went through the issue of increments, income tax, returns, filings of income tax returns, we went through the issue of course that the union is concerned about, allowances, and then we discussed the issue of the curriculum reform process that's underway and the 30 minutes that is of concern to some teachers and I think bottom line is that, I think that each point we were able to agree on a clearer timetable, moving forward, a clear structure for resolving these issues, data sharing. One of the points we made was that we need more information from the union, whenever they have these concerns, we need the specific information so that's the only way we can address these matters, if we get specific data from the unions so I think as I said generally it was a very positive, productive, respectful meeting."

Courtney Menzies:
"Were you able to get to the bottom of the salary issue, was it indeed that teachers had been transferred?"

Francis Fonseca, Minister of Education
"Yeah, there, again, these are small numbers, they shared some data, they had provided a survey for their teachers and the teachers responded to that so we're talking about, in some cases we're talking about 80 teachers out of the teacher population and in many cases these were new teachers who had come on and their paperwork was not properly filed, or they had been transferred from one management to the other and the paperwork had not followed them, so it's a question in many cases unfortunately, it's the case of managing authorities not having the proper documentation in place, or not having provided that documentation to the Ministry of Education."

In terms of the unpaid taxes, the minister explained it's simply because of the backlog they've been dealing with. But the ministry's financial unit and the treasury department came in, and they provided some shocking revelations.

Francis Fonseca, Minister of Education
"It's a backlog going back to 2015, as I've said, I think I told you all before, we brought it up to 2021, they're working on 2022 and then 2023 and again because of the new system that the tax services department has in place, what they call Iris, it's an accounting program or a computer system, you have to upload everything together at the same time so they have to wait until they finish everything and then upload all that information for each year so it's challenging but that's the process it's not a question of money, the money is there, it's a question of getting the backlog cleared up."

"As they pointed out today, the Treasury Department pointed out today, there are teachers who don't have a TIN number, a tax identification number, or it's inactive, so I think there are 100 cases of teachers where they have no TIN number, I don't know how that's possible but it's working out those things, everybody, the tax department, the finance department explained how people are working overtime, we've hired new staff, everybody is committed to because we know how important these things are to our teachers."