Gov. Pedro P. Tenorio has signed a bill into law that will ease restriction on the use of tax rebates, allowing the financially-troubled government to tap the special trust account to meet its funding needs amid shrinking cash resources.<\/p>\n
Public Law 11-49 automatically reduces the amount required to be deposited into the rebate trust account to 50 percent of all the taxes paid to the government for this purpose from 95 percent.<\/p>\n
“This will give the Commonwealth Government the additional time it needs to improve its financial situation,” the governor said in a letter to the Legislature to justify the amendment to a law that created the special trust account.<\/p>\n
The previous law, enacted in 1995, strictly prohibits the use of the tax rebate money for other purposes nor its merging with the general funds. It, however, mandates the finance department to raise other available funds to meet the shortfall in the trust account.<\/p>\n
During the administration of former governor Froilan C. Tenorio, money intended for tax rebates have not been deposited in the trust account which was blamed for this year’s rebate mess.<\/p>\n
A special team that reviewed the past government’s handling of public funds discovered early this year that money deposited in the bank stood only at $2 million when it should have been $31 million as of December 31, 1997.<\/p>\n
This year, the government had to raise $28 million to cover the missing tax rebates intended for the previous tax year.<\/p>\n
Tenorio pushed for the amendment of the law after inheriting a nearly bankrupt government to give him flexibility to funnel tax rebate funds to critical areas of government operations.<\/p>\n
Under the law, the present administration will be allowed to deposit a reduced amount in the special account until year 2000, but the governor promised, “Should the economic condition improve in the near future, amounts in excess of the 50 percent deposit requirement may still be made into the trust account.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Gov. Pedro P. Tenorio has signed a bill into law that will ease restriction on the use of tax rebates, allowing the financially-troubled government to tap the special trust account to meet its funding needs amid shrinking cash resources.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44772","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44772","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\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44772"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44772\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44772"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44772"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44772"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}