A top B.C. bureaucrat is speaking out about the mammoth job his team just completed to get the province back on track to return to the provincial sales tax on April 1st.
The resurrected PST will replace the Harmonized Sales Tax, which was first introduced in 2009 and rejected two years later by voters in a referendum.
The chief of the Finance Ministry's tax policy branch, Glen Armstrong, says a team of 14 bureaucrats worked countless hours with no overtime pay to meet the April 1st deadline to return to the PST.
He says totally revising such a tax law would have normally have taken three or four years, but it was done in 10 months.
Armstrong says it was the largest legislative project ever undertaken and completed in such a short period of time in B.C.
He says his team approached the HST with enthusiasm because they felt they were bringing in a new and more efficient tax system, but that gusto evaporated when British Columbians rebelled against the tax.
