The lack of financial information – or awareness – is one of the reasons why many Papua New Guineans are hesitant when it comes to starting businesses.
Business Link Pacific, a private sector development programme delivered by DT Global and funded by the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, recently hosted an information session at the Butibam Resource Centre in the Ahi Rural LLG of Lae district.
The session was hosted in collaboration with the Internal Revenue Commission and consultancy accounting firm, Oracle Pacific Ltd, which is also an approved Business Link Pacific advisor.
During the session, the IRC touched on the topic of Small Business Tax, which was introduced in 2019 for sole traders; people who are self-employed, who run their own business that is registered with the Investment Promotion Authority, have no business partners, and earn a total sales income of up to K250,000 per year.
Oracle Pacific then explained as best as they could on how to fill in forms and lodge tax returns.
Business Link Pacific’s Business Services Manager for PNG, Gabriel Iso, deduced from that session that more awareness and information sharing is needed to empower Papua New Guineans to venture into the SME space.
“We were increasingly challenged with the need to disseminate information on what BLP does,” he stated. “The Business Link Pacific program targets the development of SMEs in Papua New Guinea and not many SMEs out there are aware of our services.
“We launched the business support grant in July (2023) and so far, we’ve had a lot of interest that has come forward from the Lae SMEs and SMEs around the country. This information session is just another of those events or forums for us to continue to spread information awareness on what BLP does.
“It makes sense to bring in all the complementary partner bodies, like the Internal Revenue Commission. We’ve invited IPA but they were not able to come but in future, we would like to ask them to come because the Investment Promotion Authority and IRC are all the support mechanisms that SMEs have, to develop and to grow, and for compliance purposes. The IPA is undergoing its online registration, which is from manual to digital, so it’s important for them to come and explain how the online registration process works.”
Iso noted that vital information is not readily available, or people are not aware of it. He encouraged partnerships with BLP to rollout more information sharing sessions in future.
“First and foremost is the fact that there’s not too much of this information that is readily available for people to know,” he added. “We had to stop question time, obviously, due to time limitations, on the Internal Revenue Commission but that just goes to show that people are hungry. People want to know so if we have more of such events, and we get everyone in one place, we can be able to spread this information for people to be aware and they can do the right thing.”
(Butibam resident and former Busu Secondary School teacher, Nialawen Beeps, having her query answered by Lae’s Business Link Pacific – Business Service Manager, Ensie Rennie)