Experts to determine private schools’ tuition fees: Minister
Minister of Education and Higher Education Dr Mohammed Al-Fares said that financial experts will be consulted to determine private schools’ tuition fees. Fares also denied any intentions to increase those fees and stressed that he asked undersecretary Dr Haitahm Al-Athari and assistant undersecretary for private education Dr Abdul Mohsen Al-Howailah to set the regulations of distributing land plots to be used as schools.
Well-informed sources said that studies on amending the competitiveness protection body law are expected to start within a few days. On another concern, the sources said that the Ministry of Commerce and Industry (MCI) will announce forming a special follow up committee to rephrase all economic decisions and laws related to the ministry’s work. The sources added that the committee was founded upon instructions from minister Khaled Al-Roudhan with the aim of facilitating procedures and cut down the time needed for various transactions.
Financial establishments involved in the US Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) law will have to submit their second annual reports by the end of this June, said financial sources. The deferral made from June 30 to November 30 last year was exceptional and made upon a request made by Kuwait’s finance ministry to the US treasury, the sources noted. The sources added that upon instructions from the US Internal Revenues Service (IRS), the finance ministry had updated its software using the FATCA XML Schema v2.0. Some financial establishments said that the ministry had updated its system without informing them and that using the old software might have their reports rejected by the ministry system. Establishments subject to the law will have to submit reports about their financial and investments assets over KD 50,000 for individuals and KD 250,000 for companies.
Social aid
Indebted citizens who had unlawfully received social aids will have to pay those aids back, the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labor’s Assistant Undersecretary for Social Development Affairs Hassan Kathem said. He added that a special team was formed to do a full inventory of the files at the family care unit in Ashbeliya to calculate the unlawfully paid sums and report them to the financial affairs department to collect them. “The ministry received several requests to drop and write off those debts but they were all rejected because those are not the ministry’s funds, they are public funds,” he underlined.
Kuwait Oil Company’s (KOC) operational budget for the current fiscal year (2017-2018) reached KD 1.592 billion with a KD 50 million increase compared to that of 2016-2017. The parliament’s approval of the budgets of Kuwait Petroleum Corporation (KPC) and its subsidiaries is a turning point in the sector’s path towards achieving its strategic goals, including reaching the daily production of four million barrels per day by 2020.
The Ministry of Health (MOH) urged the Civil Service Commission (CSC) to provide it with 500 vacancies in order to appoint new doctors to operate the new health facilities the ministry intends to open soon. Meanwhile, MOH is expected to deposit the wages of Kuwaiti and expatriate employees working for monthly payments in their bank accounts this week that is by June 15 at most.