The senate met today in Belmopan and went over a raft of tax legislation - among others.

Most prominently the Income and Business Tax (Amendment) Bill, of 2024 will raise the PAYE threshold. The Leader of Government business introduced it and the Minister of State for finance explained how it will be like putting money in the pockets of thousands of workers:

Eamon Courtenay, Leader of Gov't Business
"Insofar as the Income and Business Tax Amendment Act is concerned, we seek to raise the threshold from 20,000 to 29,000, which would then exempt a significant number of petitions from having to pay income and business tax. More importantly, or just as importantly, when I'm president, we remove certain anomalies because there are instances where persons get an increase in salary, but because of the tax, the way the tax structure is, they end up receiving taking home less because the tax rate is higher, because they have jumped into a new tax bracket."

Chris Coye, Min of State - Finance
"The movement from the 20 to 29, the bringing the threshold at that level. I think we can't underscore enough the benefit of that to hard working class Belizeans, especially the public officers. The average income of a public officer is between 26 and $28,000 dollars. They are paying taxes right now. They will no longer be paying taxes. The average public officer."

"The shift of that threshold to the 29,000, that by itself, based on 2023 figures, will benefit over 2,800 individuals, employed individuals. Increasing immediately, over 2800, increasing immediately their net take home pay effective January 1st by $900 dollars. That's $900 in the pocket of every employed individual that benefits from this increase in threshold, or increase in the exemption amount."

"In a sense, the current tax structure for those between, what is it between 26, 20, 25, six and 30,000? The current tax structure largely pushes employer and employee alike into tax evasion. Because what is the reality is that if you get an income increase, above one of these deduction thresholds, your net take home pay goes down. So to avoid that, you have employers and employees agreeing outside of the tax system to make payments on the side. What we are doing is regularizing, not only regularizing but reducing the tax exposure of all these individuals in numbers. We're talking about over almost 2200 persons that will benefit from that. All told, the total benefit in terms of take home pay by individuals for dealing with this anomaly is over a thousand increase in net take home pay in total then you have over 5000 people now benefiting with an average increase in net take home pay of over $1,000. So so the threshold itself, the increase in the threshold and the adjustment with that, that, just adjusting tax credit brings a tremendous impact to the hardworking Belizean."