Belmopan Mayor Defends Trade License Overhaul

Belmopan’s mayor is shedding light on why so many business owners have been seeing changes in their trade license assessments. Pablo Cawich says that when the new trade board took over last year, they launched a full review of every single business on the trade roll, only to find blank files, missing records, and outdated calculations for many companies. That triggered a wave of reassessments, something he admits didn’t sit well with some businesses, even though the board’s goal was simply to ensure fees were calculated fairly and consistently across the city. And while no new regime was ever formally implemented, Cawich says they offered businesses updated, more accurate fee estimates to avoid overcharging based on the old system.

 

Pablo Cawich, Belmopan Mayor

“Let me just start of by explaining what has happened in the Belmopan over the past year when it comes to trade licenses. When this trade board, our trade board took over, we did a revision of the trade roll in its entirety. We revised every single business to ensure that correct calculations were applied and fees were correct. Doing this exercise, the trade board found a lot of cases where files were blank, empty folders for businesses. Let’s just use an example of a hundred and fifty dollars as a fee. We had instances where businesses were paying something similar to that amount. Because nothing exists to prove the trade fee, reassessments were ordered by the trade board, so reassessments were carried out to ensure proper calculations for every business. During this approach, a lot of businesses disagreed with the calculation which ended up, or the fee that was resulted.”

 

Sherlet Neal-Lopez

“Were there specific types of businesses that were more affected by the revision?”

 

Pablo Cawich

“It applied to all sorts of categories. I can’t say that it only applied to a particular category. It was throughout the entire regime.”

 

Reporter

“So the regime wasn’t passed to the senate level, so how were you guys able to implement it?”

 

Pablo Cawich

“Well, we didn’t implement it. What we did was offer a calculated value of that fee as the new rate to allow the business owners a better value for the fee, because if the old rate calculates a higher fee then it’s harder for the business to try and accept that fee.”