Uganda Revenue Authority (URA) is increasingly innovating ways of improving tax compliance in order to realize more revenue collections.
It is for this reason that URA Commissioner General, Doris Akol on Monday morning left the comfort of her office in Nakawa, Kampala to pay a visit to Kyaliwajjala Liaison office and serve taxpayers personally.
Kyaliwajjala’s URA office is responsible for all taxpayers in Kira Municipality that covers Namanve Industrial Park, Bweyogerere, Namugongo, Ssonde, Najeera and Ntinda.
Akol said it is the 4th time she is personally serving the public having done it before at Nakawa head office, Crested Towers and Diamond Trust Bank.
She added that she is always excited to serve the public as frequently as possible.
“I like to come out of my office and come on to the ground; get into the field as we call it to understand the nature of issues the staff are dealing with in the field, but also to interact with taxpayers on a face to face basis; understand the level of service we are giving, the nature of challenges taxpayers are having and also to get feedback on how we can improve our service delivery to the taxpayer,” Akol said on her purpose for this field exercise.
Akol said it was an opportunity for to serve two taxpayers directly.
Asked about the challenges the staff at Kyaliwajjala Liaison office are facing in serving taxpayers, Akol said the area coverage for Kyaliwajjala is quite large yet the staff are few. She said the challenge is being addressed by staff scheduling the area.
On the side of taxpayers, Akol said that given the fact that Kyaliwajjala is a Liaison office; some taxpayers are unable to get the full expanse of services that they require.
“For example, some of the large taxpayers who would like to process a refund can’t do it from this office because this office doesn’t have the mandate to carry out certain functions. Those taxpayers still have to go to Nakawa and it is a bit of an issue for them because if they got the service from here, they wouldn’t have incurred the time and cost of having to go to Nakawa,” Akol said, adding that URA will have to extend other services to Liaison offices to improve compliance.
Akol said Kyaliwajjala office is still new but it is already contributing over Shs30bn to URA’s total revenue collections.
On 2020 outlook, Akol said: “I am optimistic; we are on course to doing well. In terms of the target, it is still a bit unclear at this time of the year. But what I know by the end of the half year, we have already collected one trillion shillings more than collected in the last financial year so I m very optimistic that by the time the year ends probably we will have doubled that.”
She noted that the tax register had over 1.5m taxpayers by end of December 2019.
“By end of the financial year, we will be close to the 2 million mark,” Akol said.
She added that there’s a positive trend of people coming up voluntarily to register for tax.
The URA boss further said more liaison offices will be opened up in various parts of the country as long as resources are available.
