Gov't unprepared for card payments

The Finance Ministry appears to have been caught napping as regards the implementation of the new law concerning electronic transactions, and taxpayers are yet to learn which receipts will count toward their tax discount this year, what will happen with medical expenditure and whether they still need to collect paper receipts.

The ministerial decision to that effect has not been issued, but even when it is, the online system recording transactions will probably not be ready to go into operation and the first month of the year may well be lost.

The ministry's competent agency will need to hold talks with the banks, which are supposed to send each taxpayer's expenditure details to the Independent Authority for Public Revenue, and possibly by February the application will be ready for taxpayers to be able to log in and monitor their plastic money transaction records.