Chief Minister Datuk Seri Musa Aman should listen to the people’s call to stop the newly introduced state sales tax on seafood export and resolve the issue immediately.
It was said that the tax would be implemented started this month, July, as all of the seafood exporters must fill in the form provided by custom.
As the key decision maker in the state, Musa who is also Finance Minister needs to attend to the issue, ideally in the next state assembly sitting which is scheduled on next Monday and Tuesday.
For a new tax to be imposed, the government must look from all perspectives particularly in the present unfavourable economy. As Jobstreet, the career resources site, has conducted a survey which revealed that, about 90% of the Malaysian workforce can’t cope with the additional expenses incurred following the implementation of the GST. Likewise, majority of the industry player is suffering to cope with the proposed 5% export tax.
The proposed 5% seafood export tax would not only affect those exporters but also the industry upstream such as fishermen and the shrimp farmers.
They earn a very thin margin. How could they cope with the additional 5%? They have no option but transfer the 5% burden to their raw material supplier who are majority Bumiputera fishermen and shrimp farmers, by demanding price reduction from them. It is similar with the Crude Palm Oil sales tax, eventually it’s not affecting those big plantation companies which own palm oil mill, but the burden is transferred to the small planters.
Don’t start to impose a new tax which would eventually burden the poor especially during the Ramadan fasting month.
The worst scenario is, those foreign investors would shun away from the state. It’s about 40,000 workforce employed in the seafood export industry directly, haven’t count in all fishermen and shrimp farmers.
I understand the difficulty faced by the state government in order to increase the state revenue. But it’s wrong to kill the goose that lays the golden egg. If we still have the room to reduce the leakages, wastage, and corruption to the minimum level, why should we collect various new taxes from the people? The amount involved in the 1MDB scandal, easily can offset the annual total amount of the proposed seafood export tax.