Business View Caribbean - October 2016 53
fective tax rate as low as 15 percent.”
BVM: The Ministry says it wants to strengthen its ca-
pacity to “effectively regulate financial institutions
and combat financial crimes.” To what does that re-
fer?
Williams
: We are a member of the larger, global finan-
cial system. And in order to maintain that member-
ship, so that we are able to transact with foreign enti-
ties, we have had to sign on to strict regulations of our
financial system. The prescribed regulations restrict
“dirty money” entering into our financial system. Our
Financial Investigation Division is primarily focused on
ensuring that. It’s no secret that people with a lot of
money who want to evade taxes in their own country,
or who are involved in crime, look across the world at
which countries they can go to, with weak systems in
place, where they can enter into the financial system
and at the other end come out with “clean money.” We
don’t want that to happen to our system because that
would be devastating for us. So, we participate in insti-
tutions like the Caribbean Financial Action Task Force
that looks at our banking system and does whatever
assessment is needed, so that, at the end of the day,
we’re confident that we’re doing everything that we
can to ensure that our financial system remains safe
and secure and that we’re not simply a conduit for peo-
ple who want to do wrong.” (The Caribbean Financial
Action Task Force is an organization of twenty-seven
states of the Caribbean Basin, which have agreed to
implement common countermeasures to address the
problem of criminal money laundering.)
BVM: What is the goal of the Ministry’s debt man-
agement strategy?
Williams
: “Jamaica has had a long history of having
high debt to GDP.” (GDP, or Gross Domestic Product, is
the monetary value of all the finished goods and ser-
vices produced within a country’s borders in a specific
time period. It is one of the primary indicators used to
