CHAIRMAN of the City Hall Implementation Committee, Mr. Keith Burrowes also met with a team of debt recovery personnel on Wednesday.

he meeting, at the Guyana National Co-op Bank (GNCB) office, in Croal Street, Georgetown, was to discuss the approach that should be taken in retrieving monies owed to the council and he told the other participants that he will be assisting to create the strategy which will be prioritised.
“In terms of your overall strategy, which I will help you to develop, we have between now and Sunday to deal with the whole issue of making a determination of how many businesses paid against those who did not,” Burrowes advised.
He gave the collectors, until next Monday, to come up with a solution and suggested they use the one already in place but with changes made to it.
“They have one they are using already; you can adapt it and change it but I want to know how we are going to collect the $400M and what mechanism we are going to use,” Burrowes emphasised.
He said, by yesterday, they should have mapped out a plan to determine what are the names of the persons who owe the council and the amount of monies owed.
Burrowes said there is already a network to be used by his technical team to deal with this issue but it was not utilised in the right way, by City Hall, for the collection.
He continued:“I said to you guys, over two years, we will build a database which we did and this place, I could tell you, has been breeding a lot of fraud because nobody could tell me how much rates and tax payers we have.”

Unnecessary obstacles
Burrowes said, in order to be successful at collecting the taxes, the team would have to weed out the unnecessary obstacles.
“…what you are gradually doing is building a new database.”
He pointed out that the database, which was built with the press of a button, tells on what street a business is located and how much money is due by it and offers information which is timely for decision-making, but it was never used correctly.
“It tells you how much money you collected over the past month and it tells you how much more is owed to you and so on, but they never input anything over there even  though we trained them,” he observed, promising that he will be writing the Town Clerk, soon, to notify her that this system should be in place from now.
“When somebody comes to pay, we will ensure the system is in place. I will send over one of my staff to give you guys a crash course on how this system should be used. You could imagine that, by the press of a button, you would have known how many people on Sherriff Street paid and how many did not,” Burrowes remarked.
He reiterated that planning is critical to this procedure, if not; it would just be a waste of time, money and energy.
“We will look at the possibility, between now and Sunday and make a determination on the mode of payment, how we have been doing and the critical areas to look at,” the Chairman said.
He reminded the trainee collectors that implementing the system do not mean that they will stop collecting money.