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The government is taking steps to fill vacancies in the Board of Inland Revenue (BIR) and Customs and Excise after the discovery of severe staff shortages across many public sector bodies.
The revelation came from Minister in the Ministry of Finance Kennedy Swaratsingh at a post-cabinet media briefing on July 17 at the Diplomatic Centre in Port of Spain.
Swaratsingh said recruitment had already begun for the BIR while a meeting was held with Customs and Excise to address the shortages.
The move comes as the Cabinet decided on July 17 to absorb some 800 Special Reserve Police Officers into the TT Police Service to try to fill 1,154 vacancies. In May, Homeland Security Minister Roger Alexander announced 280 auxiliary fire officers would be absorbed into the TT Fire Service to meet a shortfall of over 400.
Swaratsingh admitted that filling the BIR and Customs vacancies would not be as straightforward as with the Fire and Police services.
"When you bring in people in Customs and other places, there's a level of training. So when you recruit persons in BIR, you have six months of training to be a tax officer or tax auditor. Customs is the same thing."
He said compounding the understaffing issue is attrition.
"When we stagger our recruitment processes, you bring in large batches of persons at any one point in time, the reciprocal effect of that is that all those persons leave at the same time."
One of these effects, he said, is evident at Customs and Excise where younger people were performing roles that should ideally be done by more experienced staff.
"So those are things we have to address, not just simply the recruitment. It's the recruitment, the training, the resourcing. There are a number of compounding issues that these things have led to in many organisations."
Swaratsingh sounded the alarm on understaffing at public service bodies while speaking at the Trinidad and Tobago Chamber of Industry and Commerce’s Business Outlook at the Hyatt Regency in Port of Spain, in June.
In his address, he said Customs was 227 officers short, BIR was 68 per cent understaffed and the Director of Personnel Administration had no staff.
Swaratsingh had been living in Barbados since serving as Patrick Manning administration between 2007 and 2010. He returned to TT just before the April 28 general election to throw his support behind Kamla Persad-Bissessar. He lamented the condition that had befallen the public service since he last held office.
"I remember when I was minister of Public Administration years ago, the public service was a very robust place, but over the last ten years or so, I'm not quite sure what took place. I could only tell you what we would have found...and the impact it has had on agencies to do their work."
Despite the condition of the public service and the complex solutions that would be required, Swaratsingh said the Prime Minister was pushing all her ministers to address the issues.

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