Sports challenges for 2007

The Authority should also not be the body to communicate with the respective national associations on their submissions to the NSC. That is the responsibility of the NSC.
There must be a clear policy and it must be adhered to at all times.

Revisiting the NSC
The NSC Act may well be out of date.
In any event it remains questionable whether the Act has ever really been adhered to.
The Act makes provision for the NSC to oversee the establishment, construction, management and maintenance of sports facilities in the State. However the NSC has been charged with much more than the aforementioned mandate is has under the Act.
For example, the NSC is currently expected to receive requests from national sports associations for a variety of things including funding and the waiver of duties on sporting equipment and goods.
In actual fact there seems little that is done in this regard. National associations are told that the requests have been forwarded to the relevant authorities and that’s it.
In respect of the waiver of duties the requests are to be submitted to the NSC who then sends them to the Ministry of Sports who then sends them to the Ministry of Finance who then sends them to Cabinet. That trail indicates the typical bureaucracy that is the public service. It is also indicative of the lengthy nature of the process involved.
Of course this means that by the time the approval is given by the Cabinet and communicated via the same trail on the return route the equipment and other materials would have already accumulated relatively large expenses in terms of warehouse rent, adding to the overall cost.
Additionally, the Government appears to have reduced the threshold for waiver of duty across the board to 50%, down from 75% in 2005.
National sports associations do not engage in buying and selling of equipment as a general rule. There should therefore be no reason whatsoever for the Government to require that these bodies pay any duty whatsoever on equipment and sporting goods.