The Commissioner General of Uganda revenue authority (URA), John Rukoji Musinguzi has revealed that the tax body is ready to overhaul its processes in a bid to collect Shs19.8 trillion during 2020/2021 financial year.
“This is not going to be business as usual, we are going to overhaul most of our processes so that going forward, and we are prepared to deal with the new challenges.” He said during post budget e-conference peddled at enhancing the public’s understanding of the National Budget 2020/21 and Tax Policy measures.
Earlier this month, parliament passed a whopping Shs45.4 trillion budget for the next Financial Year 2020/21 compared with the Shs 40.5 trillion for this Financial Year ending June 30 amidst the ravaging coronavirus pandemic.
The government aims at collecting Shs19.8 trillion through various taxes and the rest through domestic and external borrowings, aids and grants to finance the planned budget.
In a bid to achieve their target, Mr Rukoji said they are going to look deeply into the issue of governance and management of taxes, deepen their data analysis and give taxpayers a better experience.
“We are going to clean our data and make sure that is accurate before we use it to draw positions to focus on and relax as the country’s tax collector. We are going to be more inward looking. We’re going to focus on domestic tax collection rather than pay all attention to international/foreign sources.” He said
He said the impact of #COVID-19 on our economy and the global economy isn’t yet fully established though our revenue has been greatly impacted.
Mr. Musinguzi noted that #COVID-19 pandemic has shown that relying on external revenue is not sustainable hence the need to focus on domestic revenue collection.
He pledged that the tax body will not look on and be part of the causes of young businesses in our country to collapse because of over taxation. We would be defeating our own purpose of existence if we cause small businesses to collapse because we need them to grow bigger with incomes which we can tax later
“We hope to work closely with everyone to ensure that we serve you better while we gather enough revenue that we will, in turn, use to develop our country and improve lives.”
