MANDEVILLE, Manchester — Two members of the Opposition People’s National Party (PNP) vying for constituencies in this south-central parish have labelled as “scandalous” the expenditure to lease and retrofit a building here for a new revenue service centre (RSC).

Tax Administration Jamaica’s Commissioner General Ainsley Powell told Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee last Tuesday that more than $1 billion is being spent to retrofit buildings in Annotto Bay, St Mary, and Manchester to accommodate new revenue service centres.

Powell also told the parliamentary committee that the lease, to date, on the Annotto Bay property was $23 million and a staggering $451 million for the Mandeville location.

Mayor of Mandeville Donovan Mitchell, who is also the PNP’s representative for Manchester Central, and Opposition Senator Peter Bunting, the party’s representative for Manchester Southern, questioned the expenditure while addressing the party’s Knockpatrick divisional conference at May Day High School on Sunday.

Bunting said that when he thought of the $12 million per month the Government is paying to rent an empty building “that is more than a scandal, it is a crime when you have children wetting up every time it rains” in the context of the deteriorating condition of the physical plant at Pratville Primary School in south Manchester.

Last week TAJ had explained that the new tax office will prevent people from being exposed to the elements, unlike the present location on South Race Course Road.

“With over 250,000 payment transactions plus other services yearly, the customer experience at the existing locations in Mandeville is restricted to standing room only inside the tax office, with customers sometimes having to wait outside — seated under tents — and exposed to the elements. Hence, the need to replace the tax office with a full-service revenue service centre similar to the revenue service centre at Constant Spring in St Andrew, with adequate waiting areas inside and sufficient parking space outside,” TAJ said in a release.

Bunting, a former Manchester Central Member of Parliament, also highlighted the state of the regional hospital in reiterating his concern regarding the expenditure.

“… When you think of the patients lying down on cardboard for days on the wooden bench at Mandeville Regional Hospital with drip in their arm, is not hearsay. I went there to visit a patient four days after they were admitted and they were still in the waiting area, lying down on wooden bench with drip in their arms. That is scandalous when this Government is using taxpayers’ money — $450 million so far since 2020 — to rent an empty building. The people have become almost inoculated to it; there is no more outrage,” added Bunting.

Mitchell also painted a grim picture of the hospital’s accident and emergency department.

“A lot of us really sit down and we like to listen and we have not seen it for ourselves, because most times if you are not sick or you are visiting somebody, you are not allowed to go to that department,” he said.

“When you look at what is happening in the accident and emergency department yu stomach growl because people are lying down left, right and centre — on the floor, on the benches, in a chair — naked as them born on the stretcher. It cannot work when they are using $1 billion to renovate a building and there is not [enough] parking there,” added Mitchell.

Said Mitchell: “On any given day, if you have to go grocery shopping there is no parking there for you, so how come they are going to put the tax office up there when there is no parking for the people of Mandeville? Our currency in Jamaica is Jamaican dollars but my understanding is that we are paying rent for the property in US dollars.”

Mitchell suggested that the expenditure is questionable against the backdrop of a new tax office being built in Christiana at an estimated cost of $670 million.

“Up in Christiana they are building a new tax office, and I am sure it doesn’t cost $1 billion to build a big office,” he said.