SUBANG Member of Parliament Wong Chen slammed Finance Minister Tengku Zafrul Tengku Abdul Aziz for predicting a high revenue turnover for the government from corporate income tax collection.

Criticising Tengku Zafrul’s maiden budget speech today, PKR’s Wong Chen said the former banker-turned-minister was “super over optimistic” over the collections during the Covid-19 year.

 “Wow, the government predicts a bigger collection of corporate income tax next year than the pre-Covid year of 2019! Hmmm… someone is somewhat super over optimistic?

“For 2019, the government collected corporate income tax of RM63.75 billion. For 2021, the government is now projecting RM64.60 billion.

“I suppose the government believes that Covid-19 will just disappear on January 1, as predicted by the super-genius Trump,” he said on his social media, referring to US President Donald Trump’s comment on the pandemic.

Besides this, Wong Chen also criticised the government for reducing the subsidies and social assistance by 6.4% compared to the year 2020.

He said subsidies and social assistance were going to be reduced from RM23.9 billion in 2019 and RM 20.14 billion in 2020 to RM18.85 billion for 2021.

“This is a fall of 6.4% compared to 2020,” he said, adding that the Perikatan Nasional (PN) MPs were applauding when the finance minister read the reduction.

“How can this be right? The government is probably moving expenditure items about and moving them to the Covid-19 Fund?” he questioned.

Former domestic trade and consumer affairs minister Saifuddin Nasution meanwhile said that the Budget 2021 should focus on reducing the public’s burden at this critical period.

“Last week, I attended Pakatan Harapan’s (PH) recommendation (on budget) to the government.

“Our recommendation touched on various things but the main focus was to reduce the burden of the people through cash assistance, further moratorium, reduction of tax levies for the needy.

“Our recommendation was also to have more job opportunities created and maintain existing jobs,” said the Kulim Bandar Baru MP in a Facebook post.

The budget tabled today provided several incentives to Malaysians, including increased financial assistance to low-income groups as well as allowing withdrawals from the Employee Provident Fund. – November 6, 2020.