Somewhere in Jamaica last week a small distributor loaded a truck and delivered to a shop that still owes him for the last two loads. He delivered anyway. If he stops, the shop buys from someone else and he loses the account. He is not the exception. He is the economy right now.

Almost every publicly listed company in Jamaica is carrying a liquidity problem, and it did not have to happen. I have spent recent weeks going through the published financial statements of every listed Jamaican company I could get open — not the press releases, the actual accounts. Close to half of those I could read properly are now financing their customers faster than their own suppliers finance them. They have become lenders by accident. Others have become borrowers by necessity, leaning on suppliers because there is nowhere else to lean. Many are both at once.

That is a toxic arrangement and it is spreading. The rate at which listed companies file their accounts late has gone from under one in 100 three years ago to nearly one in 10 this year.

So where did the money go?

It did not go anywhere. It is sitting in the accounts of Jamaican insurance companies.

The Financial Services Commission reported that insurers’ reinsurance recovery assets rose 472 per cent — some $77.7 billion — after Melissa. The foreign reinsurers paid, exactly as the treaties required. The money entered the country and entered the industry. What it has not done, in any volume anyone will confirm, is reach the policyholders who bought the cover.

This month the industry told us how that is going. It did so in a full-page advertisement. The insurers, brokers and loss adjusters announced they are targeting settlement of major eligible claims by the end of September, with the brokers speaking of the vast majority of claims by then, excluding complex and litigated matters — without defining either category or saying how anyone would measure it.

The end of September will be 11 months after the storm.

The advertisement does not say how many claims remain open. It does not say how much has been paid. There is still no official market-wide settlement figure of any kind. The insurers’ own association keeps no consolidated tally. The regulator, which has the numbers, has not published them, and did not adopt the September target itself. The only public estimate came from one insurance chief executive, who put the market-wide rate at 35 to 40 per cent at the end of May.

Money in: measured to the decimal point and published. Money out: no figure, no tally, no deadline anyone will stand behind.

In every functioning economy, insurance is the mechanism that puts liquidity back into the system after a disaster. That is its purpose. The claim is paid, the money moves, the business pays its suppliers and staff and contractors, and within weeks the cash is circulating through the parish. Melissa cost this country an estimated US$12.2 billion — 57 per cent of a year’s output. That is precisely the scale of loss the system exists to absorb and recycle.

It did not recycle it. It is holding it. This is not a customer service complaint; it is a macroeconomic failure, and it should be described as one.

So companies contractually entitled to money to rebuild with have rebuilt out of their own pockets. They spent the cash cushion on the roof the policy should have covered, then stretched their suppliers, because that is the only credit left that costs nothing and cannot easily be enforced. The unpaid claim did not stay with the policyholder. It walked down the chain to people who never bought a policy and have no standing to complain about one.

That is where the man with the truck comes in. He is three steps below a claim he has never heard of.

Government is not a bystander in this, and the reason is worth stating plainly, because it is not what most people think. Regulation 135 is widely described as a 30-day settlement rule. It is not one. It requires payment within 30 days of four conditions being met: that the insured event has been proved, liability under the policy has been agreed, the amount payable has been agreed, and the claimant’s entitlement to payment has been established. Two of those four require the insurer’s own agreement. Until the insurer agrees liability, and agrees the sum, the clock does not start.

So 11 months is not a breach of the 30-day rule. It is what the 30-day rule permits.

Interest is payable once the clock starts. There is power in the Insurance Act to suspend a registration for unreasonable delay in settling claims — a weapon so large it is never reached for. What’s not there is anything a policyholder can actually use. No deadline on the assessment itself, which is the part that takes the 11 months. No ombudsman with binding authority. No plain right to damages for the loss the delay causes: the wages that could not be paid, the contract that was lost, the business that did not reopen.

And the obligations that do not depend on that clock are honoured unevenly. The regulator’s own market conduct guidelines require an insurer, whenever damage is assessed, to send the claimant a copy of the written estimate used to calculate the compensation. They require that where settlement runs past the 30-day period, the claimant be told in writing within five days, given the reasons, and a timeline. Ask around western Jamaica how often that happened. A rule nobody enforces is not a rule. It is a description of what should have occurred.

Every country using the insurance model we use built scaffolding around it. We took the model and left out the protections, and a Category 5 has now shown us what that means. Closing the gap has not been treated as urgent, and the cost of that is showing up in the national accounts. A government that lets its private sector be drained of working capital will be repairing a weaker economy with less revenue to do it. That bill arrives later, and it is larger.

Into that, we are now proposing to raise General Consumption Tax (GCT) on hotel rooms from 10 per cent to 15.

Say it the plain way: That is a 50 per cent increase in the rate, applied to the industry the hurricane hit hardest, while it is still waiting to be paid for the damage.

And it cannot be passed on. Hotel rooms are not sold like a patty. They are sold 12 to 18 months ahead to tour operators at a fixed price with the tax already inside it. Rooms for next winter were priced and contracted this year. When the rate moves the hotel cannot reopen the contract. There is nobody to hand it to.

So the operator eats it, and there are only four places it comes from: Marketing, repairs and maintenance, capital projects, and the payment cycle.

Marketing goes first, because cutting it costs nothing this season — it costs you next season, when the rooms you did not sell sit empty. Then the painting waits and the roof waits. Then the refurbishment moves a year and then off the plan. And underneath all of it, the payment cycle stretches.

Look at who is on the other end of those four decisions: the printer, painter, roofer, refrigeration technician, contractor who was going to build the new block and the 20 men he was going to hire, the farmer, the laundry, and the produce truck. Three of the four do not delay a payment. They cancel the order.

A supplier with a cushion can absorb that. One already lending to his customers cannot. He passes a point and he goes — the bank pulls his facility, or he misses payroll, or he sells the truck. Then the shops lose a supplier, the staff lose their jobs, and the treasury loses the GCT, the PAYE and the NIS he was paying. It gains on one line and loses on three.

Consider what we are proposing to tax, too. Room capacity is not back. Occupancy is not back. Properties open before Melissa are still closed. You cannot raise a rate on a shrinking base and expect the projected revenue to appear.

And the damage runs past the people already here. Government measures its tourism success in announcements — rooms in the pipeline, developments signed, capital committed. Every one depends on somebody choosing Jamaica over the Dominican Republic or Mexico. That investor is not reading our brochures. He is reading how we treated the last people who came: that a Category 5 arrived, that contractually owed insurance took most of a year, that owners financed their own recovery, and that our answer to their weakened position was a 50 per cent tax increase they cannot pass on.

The owners already here are not the constituency. They have spent their money and their hotels are not going anywhere. The prospectus is being written for the ones who have not spent theirs — and we are writing it in public, in the business pages, one decision at a time.

At best this is a short-sighted self-inflicted wound. At worst it is monetary suicide: draining working capital out of the private sector during a contraction, then taxing the sector least able to pass the cost on, and calling the result revenue.

Three things need to happen, and two of them cost the treasury nothing. Publish the claims numbers. Total notified, settled, paid, and outstanding, by insurer, monthly. The regulator already collects them. An industry confident in its performance does not advertise a target while withholding the score.

Close the legislative gap. Put a statutory deadline on the assessment itself, not merely on the payment that follows it. Interest that runs from the date of loss, not from the date the insurer concedes. An ombudsman with binding authority. A right to damages for delay. Not after the next storm — now, in the calm.

And leave the tax rate where it is. Revisit it when room capacity, occupancy and arrivals return to where they stood before the storm — let that be the test, not a date on a calendar. If the sector recovers, the base grows, and the treasury collects more at 10 per cent than it ever would at 15 from a sector that did not.

The man loading that truck is not in the room when any of this is decided. He has no lobbyist. He did not fail to insure himself and he did not fail to pay his premiums. Somebody else’s claim simply never settled, three steps above him, and the shortfall walked downhill until it reached him.

He has waited 11 months already. Do not hand him the bill as well.

Andrew Houston Moncure is managing director of Bluefields Bay Villas & Suites in Westmoreland. He is a property policyholder with an outstanding Hurricane Melissa claim.