Vice Speaker Janet U. Maratita (R-Saipan) has introduced a bill that would impose a 5-percent tax on all gaming revenues in the CNMI.<\/p>\n
House Bill 20-31 was among the 37 legislative measures that were introduced in yesterday\u2019s first session of the House of Representatives on Capital Hill.<\/p>\n
HB 20-31 was referred to the House Committee on Ways and Means chaired by Rep. Angel A. Demapan (R-Saipan). HB 20-31, if it becomes a law, would take effect after 24 months or two years.<\/p>\n
Maratita\u2019s bill, in terms of actual revenues and expenditures, found out that the government actually overspent in the past fiscal years, which amounted from $800,000 in the early 1980s to several millions of dollars in the more recent fiscal years.<\/p>\n
\u201cIndeed, the CNMI government has been incurring a budget deficit since it first became a Commonwealth in 1978 and then governor Carlos S. Camacho ended his term in 1982 with a $5 million deficit,\u201d Maratita wrote on the HB 20-31.<\/p>\n
The deficit jumped to $87.9 million at the end of fiscal year 2001 and after one year went over $100 million at $104.4 million.<\/p>\n
She said the new gaming industry is largely un-taxed and it is about time they are taxed in a fair and reasonable manner. \u201cThe exclusive license fee that is paid currently is arguably a fair price for a legal monopoly, but even an entity that enjoys exclusive gaming rights should be paying their fair share of taxes.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Vice Speaker Janet U. Maratita (R-Saipan) has introduced a bill that would impose a 5-percent…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":48,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[26,1860,194,14696],"class_list":["post-245580","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news","tag-cnmi","tag-hb","tag-house-bill","tag-house-committee"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245580","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/48"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=245580"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245580\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=245580"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=245580"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=245580"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}