The Minister of State for Finance (General Duties), Henry Musasizi, presenting the national budget and accompanying documents for the next financial year during the House sitting on Thursday 28 March 2024
Uganda Revenue Authority (URA) is expected to collect tax revenue worth Shs31.574Trn to finance the 2024/25 national budget, which is an increase of Shs1.9Trn from the current target of Shs29.672Trn in the FY 2023/24.
Henry Musasizi, Minister of State for Finance made the revelation while appearing before Parliament’s Finance Committee where he led the team from URA to defend their 2024/25 national budget priorities.
Government recently presented a Shs58.34 trillion national budget for the 2024/2025 financial year, intended to focus on ‘full monetisation of the Ugandan economy through agriculture, industrialisation, expanding and broadening services, digital transformation and market access’.“The projected revenue collection for 2024/25 is Shs31.574Trn, an increment of Shs1.9Trn from the current financial year 2024/25 target of Shs29.672Trn. To achieve this projected target, URA will continue to undertake the following reforms; roll out and enforcement of electronic receipting and invoicing solution. The objective of this reform is to ensure that taxpayers are able to keep clear records, file returns in a timely manner and they are able to efficiently assess their VAT. I call upon every Ugandan to support this cause,” said Minister Musasizi.
The budget for URA for 2024/25 is Shs564.26Bn which is slightly lower than the current 2023/24 resource envelop of Shs619.99Bn.
This is because URA suffered a budget cut of Shs55.73Bn on unutilized wage. There is a wage which wasn’t utilized for the last two financial years and the system has picked it as one of the candidates to be utilized for other purposes.
John Rujoki, the Commissioner General at URA, noted that the target for domestic taxes was Shs19.003Trn of which Shs12.886Trn has been collected by 31st March 2024, while tax on international trade was Shs10.669Trn of which only Shs7.051Trn has been collected, bringing total collection to Shs19.937Trn against the target of Shs29.672Trn.
Musinguzi says 882,286 new taxpayers have been registered so far in FY 2023/24, bringing the total number of registered/direct taxpayers to 3,500,294.
