Jamaica assesses a property tax it declines to collect.

Unpaid property tax is a first charge on the land. Seven years after it falls due it stops being recoverable from anyone at all, and the charge on the land is extinguished, whether or not a single step was ever taken to collect it.

How much has gone that way has not been published since 2016. This program has two goals: get the record published, and get the seven year rule changed so that property tax accrues until somebody pays it.

Property tax that falls due and goes unpaid becomes a first charge and lien on the land itself under section 21(1) of the Tax Collection Act. That is a strong security. It attaches to the property rather than to the person, and in ordinary conveyancing practice it has to be dealt with before a sale completes. Section 21(2) says the charge stays in force until the tax is paid and may be realized at any time.

Section 21(3) then cancels both. It provides that no such tax shall be recoverable from any person except within seven years from the date it became due, and that after those seven years any charge or lien on the real property is extinguished.

Read those together and the effect is complete. At seven years the debt cannot be recovered from the owner, cannot be recovered from anyone else, and no longer encumbers the land. Nothing has to happen for that to occur. No decision is taken, no file is closed, no officer signs anything, and no record of it is published. It is simply the passage of time, and it runs identically whether the Collector pursued the debt for six years or never opened the file.

The Auditor General's Department last examined this in a performance audit published in July 2016, covering April 2011 to March 2016. That audit is the last document that states how much was extinguished, and how much enforcement actually took place. Nothing comparable has been published in the ten years since.

The single recent collection figure, J$9.306 billion for 2023/24, was not published for Jamaicans. It appears in Table 7.1 of the Government of Jamaica's own PEFA assessment of September 2024, a report prepared to a standard set by international lenders. It is measured against a J$10.536 billion budget, an eleven point seven percent shortfall, and it is stated net of the collection commission and of other deductions, so it is a floor rather than a total.

The same assessment names, in Table 19.4, a Tax Administration Jamaica revenue arrears aging report for 2023/24. So the document exists and is compiled every year. PEFA scored that dimension D, its lowest grade.

Property tax does not fund the national budget in the ordinary way. It is paid into the Parochial Revenue Fund, and under the Local Government (Financing and Financial Management) Act 2016 ninety percent of what is collected in a parish is paid over to that parish's municipal corporation each month. It is the largest single source of money a parish controls.

Which produces the gap this program is concerned with. The body that spends the money is elected and answerable at the parish. The body that collects it is an agency of the Ministry of Finance and is not. A municipal corporation can write to Tax Administration Jamaica and ask what enforcement took place in its own parish. It cannot require an answer.

One consequence is easy to check and hard to explain. The responsible Minister's sectoral debate presentations of 28 May 2025 and 3 June 2026 use the word "property" no times at all, in a sector drawing close to half its transfers from property tax.

If the money is not arriving, the obvious question is who can be made to explain that. The answer is more awkward than it looks, because there is no single chain of command running from a parish committee up to Tax Administration Jamaica. There are two chains, and they never command each other.

Voters in each of the fourteen divisions return a councillor, the councillors constitute the Corporation, the Corporation elects its own Mayor and appoints its committees, and the Chief Executive Officer answers to it as accounting officer. That is the whole of the parish's authority, and none of it reaches the Collector of Taxes.

Which is why the audit chain matters more than it looks. The Auditor General audits Tax Administration Jamaica and reports to Parliament, and the parliamentary Public Accounts Committee can summon it. That is the only room in the country where both chains answer at the same time, and the Auditor General has already been in it on this exact subject.

Nothing on that map starts by itself. Every mechanism on it is reactive: it responds to a specific question on the record, and it ignores a general state of affairs however large. So it begins at the cheapest rung that carries a duty to answer, and climbs only when an answer does not come.

One is a disclosure the state already compiles and has stopped publishing. The other is a change to the law itself. They belong together, because the first is what makes the case for the second, and neither can be argued honestly without the other.