The Ministry of Finance will enlist the help of private debt collection firms to collect the country's outstanding real property taxes (RPT).
"We have one company engaged so far and we're looking to engage additional companies because it's a lot of work," Minister of State for Finance Michael Halkitis told Guardian Business.
"It's a large amount that's outstanding, and what we decided to do is segment the work and have various firms working for us because it spreads the work around," stated Halkitis.
The government has already employed financial services firm Kikivarakis & Co. to assist with the valuation and collection of the outstanding taxes. Kikivarakis & Co. began its tax arrears collection initiative in May, but there has been little update on its progress in recent months.
Guardian sources indicated earlier this year that the use of private companies would increase the likelihood of collecting the taxes.
Although early estimates valued the tax arrears at $500 million, Halkitis dismissed that figure, noting that the Ministry of Finance found errors "almost daily," which caused frequent adjustments to the estimate.
The minister suggested that the value of the outstanding arrears is smaller than originally projected, stating: "We often find that the numbers that we believed to be outstanding are not really outstanding."
However, Halkitis did not provide an updated approximation for the value of the outstanding taxes or a timeframe for their collection, but added the government hoped to have an update on RPT reform and collection efforts
before the mid-year budget discussions.
Halkitis acknowledged that the government's current "inadequate" tax collection resources is responsible for the collection efforts' slow progress, and revealed that the government will partner with United States information technology firm Tyler Technologies to create an updated tax service.
"What we have learned is that the information in the system is not always reliable. What we recognize is that the IT system that we have in place is inadequate to track, to make updates, and so we have entered into an agreement with an IT provider to give us a new property tax system.
"Going forward, we want to have clean information in the system so that years from now we're not back in this position," said Halkitis.
Despite the delays, Halkitis said the process had started, "and is beginning to get some results and actual money coming in."

Click here to read more at The Nassau Guardian