THE Government confirmed yesterday that the increasing use of the free WhatsApp messenger by mobile phone users continues to be reflected in drops in telephone call tax revenues.

Minister of Finance and the Public Service Dr Nigel Clarke admitted to the loss in revenue, in responding to Opposition spokesman on finance Mark Golding’s questions about a $1.1-billion gap in the figures produced in the revenue estimates, which were tabled along with the 2019/20 Estimates of Expenditure in Parliament last week Tuesday.

The minister attributed the reduction in the projected revenues to the increasing use of the free WhatsApp call service, which has become very popular among Jamaican mobile phone users.

“You think that WhatsApp use is going to increase by that much in the coming year?” Golding asked.

Golding described as “fairly dramatic” the 35 per cent fall in revenues from the telephone call tax, according to the Revenue Estimates projected. The estimates projected a reduction in income from the projected $3.2 billion for 2018/19 by approximately $1.1 billion, and has estimated instead revenues of $2.113 billion for 2018/19 and $2.116 for 2019/20, instead.

But, Dr Clarke pointed out that although the Revenue Estimates showed that up to the end of December 2018, the treasury had collected only $2.1 billion of the $3.2 billion, the total revenues for 2018/19 could actually end up at about $2.7 billion, as another $500 million could be collected from the tax by the end of the fiscal year on March 31.

He explained that the decline has continued over several years, and the changes which have been occurring in communications have been making it increasingly difficult to estimate the tax revenues from the sector.

“The industry is going through changes that are making budgeting (for the call tax) challenging and difficult to anticipate what the overall impact is going to be,” Clarke stated.

“If you look at last year, we would have budgeted $3.2 billion. But, if it is uniform, based on December (figures), it looks like it is going to come out at about $2.7 billion. So it is lower than the $3.2 billion,” Clarke admitted.

Clarke’s predecessor as minister of finance and the public service, Audley Shaw, had also expressed a fear that the increasing use of WhatsApp was playing havoc with the Telephone Call Tax in 2017.

Shaw said that data-using technology like WhatsApp could reduce the flow of Government revenues.

Shaw made the confirmation while responding to an assertion by former technology minister, Phillip Paulwell, in Parliament, that data-using technology, like WhatsApp, was reducing the level of taxes from a tax levy on phone calls, which Paulwell had introduced in 2012/13 as part of a $16-billion tax package, but which was not validated in Parliament until 2017.