President Yoweri Museveni is expected later today to commission the Uganda Revenue Authority (URA) Tower, the fancy Skyscraper that will be home to the tax body.
Located in Nakawa, the state-of-the-art building is divided into four podiums and eighteen tower floors totaling to 26,021 square metres. It is perhaps the tallest building in Kampala and Uganda.
The Shs139bn project is fully funded by the Government of Uganda.
It includes a car parking structure for 360 cars plus surface parking for 710 vehicles.
“The total area of the parking structure is 12,923 square metres with five (5) levels for parking and the sixth level designed to house a crèche for breastfeeding staff,” Vincent Seruma, Assistant Commissioner-Public & Corporate Affairs at URA told Business Focus in an earlier interview.
“At peak in 10 years’ time, the building will accommodate up to 1,700 staff,” he added.
According to URA, the overall objective of the project is to provide infrastructure for better service delivery and the strategy is to have all URA back office operation in Kampala, Mukono and Entebbe converge at Nakawa Headquarters building.
The benefits of the building
In an earlier interview, Ian Rumanyika, the Manager Public & Corporate Affairs at URA noted that the building comes with a number of benefits, but most importantly it will save taxpayers over US$3 million (over UShs11bn) annually the tax body has been spending on rent.
“This is expected to reduce the cost of doing business for taxpayers through provision of one-stop-service-centre and savings on rent, transport, ICT connectivity, security, courier services, for URA.
It is envisaged that only tax information centres will remain operational in central Kampala and its environs after the closure of the main tax offices in Kampala East, North, Central, Entebbe and Mukono,” Rumanyika said.
The building will also facilitate a full integration of the back office service to support the self service business model of e-transactions.
It is also expected that URA will offer faster and better services to clients resulting from process integration while reducing administrative costs to the taxpayer and URA.
Rumanyika said the building will also improve URA’s image and corporate branding in the Public domain.
“URA has been the only revenue administration body in the EAC Region without a befitting headquarters building,” he said.
