A high-stakes legislative showdown over Belize’s deeply divisive Revenue Authority Bill has taken an unexpected turn, after the proposed legislation failed to reach the Senate floor for its scheduled debate on Tuesday, September 11, 2026. Dean Flowers, president of the Public Service Union (PSU) – one of the bill’s most vocal opponents – has broken his silence on the sudden delay, leveling sharp criticism at the leadership of the Belize Tax Services Department and the Ministry of Finance, while claiming the government’s case for the semi-autonomous body has completely unraveled.
Flowers, who has led sustained pushback against the proposed reform, did not offer a definitive explanation for why the bill was pulled from Tuesday’s Senate agenda. However, he launched a blistering attack on the credibility of the policy’s backers, arguing that their repeated justifications for creating the Semi-Autonomous Revenue Authority are riddled with contradictions and factual inaccuracies.
“What I can say to you is that the Public Service Union has put out plainly that the leadership of the Belize Tax Service Department and the leadership of the Ministry Finance don’t know what the hell they are doing and they are contradicting themselves every time they make a statement,” Flowers said in a public address following the delay. “We have been able to take the law, put it beside what they are saying, take their figures put it beside what they are proposing and we have been able to show that these people are misguided and they have misinformed Cabinet that supported that bill.”
Flowers issued a direct public challenge to the director of the Belize Tax Services Department, demanding a formal response to critical correspondence the PSU has released outlining its objections to the bill. He doubled down on his core claim that the government has exhausted all attempts to defend the proposal, which supporters frame as a reform to boost administrative efficiency in Belize’s tax collection system.
“They have ran out of those argument, completely ran out of arguments to justify what they cannot justify, what is unjustifiable,” Flowers added. “It cannot be that there will be greater efficiency in the Belize Tax Services Department.”
This report is a transcribed excerpt from an evening television news broadcast, with all speaker remarks preserved as delivered, including standardized spelling for phrases originally spoken in Kriol.