URA Registers 189, 377 New Taxpayers Despite Covid-19 Shock

URA Commissioner General, John R. Musinguzi

Uganda Revenue Authority (URA) registered  189, 377 new taxpayers on its taxpayer register in Financial Year 2020/21 despite the Covid-19 shock.

The revelation was made by URA Commissioner General, John R. Musinguzi on Thursday during the annual press briefing.

“By the end of the FY 2020/21, the taxpayer register had 1,783,493 taxpayers,” Musinguzi said, adding: “ In addition, process improvements were undertaken like the Tax Identification Number (TIN) registration which has been simplified, from excel templates into a simple single web form to facilitate taxpayer registration. This has further been linked with the NIRA database to make it easier to register for tax once you have a NIN.”

Now, with the introduction of the Tujenge (Let’s build Uganda together) Moving office, URA expects to get more taxpayers as the mobile buses will be moving to remote areas of Uganda.

So far, two buses have been procured at Shs1.4 billion each. URA says additional two buses are on the way to match four regions of the country.

“Our tax payer – tax collector ratio is the highest in the region. 12, 000 tax payers to 1 officer and then you find a group of staff in one regional office collecting taxes in 10 districts. So, that’s really not a very practical thing. This also means that we sit and wait for tax payers to come to us but now with this bus, and that’s why we pray that we raise the number to 4. We can have the mobile office assigned to every region and then we draw up a schedule and we know that by this date, we will be in this town, on this date we will be in this town and we will do the following,” Musinguzi said.