GST-Free Weekend Returns to be Submitted in Mid-January 2025

Longsworth mentioned that Belize Tax Services personnel will revisit several stores where issues were raised about the tax waivers. She also noted that returns for the GST-free weekends won’t be submitted until mid-January 2025.

 

Michelle Longsworth, Director General, Belize Tax Services

“As of today, we are sending back out our officers.  We had some who worked on Saturday and Sunday, so they know the stores or the businesses that require further assistance.  We are sending back out our officers to these businesses to just have that dialog with them, for them to clearly understand the issues that were brought to us.  So, we have the names of the stores, we have the issues that were reported by consumers, so these are the things that we’re going to address with them.  And again, this is countrywide, so we have persons going countrywide because it has to be, I think one of the big ones was not accepting payment by credit or debit card.  And, as I explained over the weekend to several businesses, we can’t expect consumers to be walking around with a load of cash these days.  So it is expected that they will use their credit or debit cards and that was a big one and we fixed that quite easily. Sales made this month, in December, businesses will not file until January fifteenth.  So, it is at that time when they submit their returns, their GST returns for December, in January, we’ll be able to look at how the GST collections decreased and how the business tax revenue increased because, remember, there’s an increase in spending because more people went out to buy.  And so you have to look at [the fact that] we projected earlier that based on our calculation in a given December weekend, we would project on those two days $2.5 million [dollars] in collections in revenue for GST.”

 

Another GST-free weekend comes up this Saturday and Sunday.