KEY TRA STRATEGIES TO COLLECT 15TRI/- FOR BUDGET

TRA Director of Education and Taxpayer Services,
Mr Richard Kayombo.

The Tanzania Revenue Authority (TRA) has unveiled its key strategies to enable it achieve a target of collecting 15.1 trillion/- to finance this year’s budget.

The taxman told the ‘Daily News’ recently that among others, it is going to work under effective network with all government institutions, regional and district authorities on revenues collection.

During an interview with this newspaper at the TRA headquarters in Dar es Salaam earlier this week, the Director of Education and Taxpayer Services, Mr Richard Kayombo, said the authority has moved to put in place major plans after it had learnt of the tough task ahead in garnering 15.1tri/- to feed into 2016/17 budget estimate of 29.5tri/-.

In this year’s budget, the government intends to spend 11.82tri/-, equivalent to 40 per cent, on development projects to ensure that it achieves its goal of bringing development to its people.

“To achieve this, we (TRA), as an institution, have already had a strategic meeting led by the Commissioner General and came up with institutional as well as regional and district strategies,” Mr Kayombo reported.

He said the strategies are focusing on ensuring that every deserving tax is perfectly collected without allowing loopholes used to divert tax. “In succeeding this, we are prepared to work closely with government top leaders, leaders of various levels in the ministries and those in the regional and district level,” he said.

The new move has also taken into account making the issue of revenue collection be part of the top agenda in all regions and districts.

The TRA resolved to direct all its regional managers to conduct regular meetings with regional administrators in order to help each other in collecting revenue and addressing challenges that were impeding the exercise to succeed.

Mr Kayombo further noted that a countrywide campaign is in the offing that would see all traders are registered into tax system. The exercise, which is expected to start in the near future, is aimed at increasing the tax base by targeting the potential taxpayers in the informal sector.

This would be hand in hand with opening many new branches and strengthening the TRA’s tax payment system so that people could pay tax through mobile money and all payments could be made through mobile.

He called on the public to see the TRA’s new strength as positive move since it intends to enable the government realize its development plans and pay the foreign debts. “People should not see the issue of paying tax as punishment, instead they should have a will of paying tax,” he said.

Furthermore, additional revenue is expected to be collected from the rental income tax as the authority moves to enforce compliance to paying rental tax among the landlords.

The authority said it would embark on house-to-house verification of rental contracts and fees as basis for establishing and collecting the appropriate tax revenues.

Mr Kayombo asked landlords and tenants to be honest in stating the correct rental costs as a basis for determining the tax revenues, warning that any fraudulent acts will amount in stern legal measures accompanied by heavy fines. But, according to Mr Kayombo, the new plans would need more labour force to undertake the responsibility of collecting revenues.

In addressing this, he said, this year the authority would recruit 150 new staff and 300 others are currently going through training for being employed early next year.

Plans are also underway to deploy staff in the local government to collect property tax on behalf of the TRA to have an adequate work force to collect revenue.

TRA Domestic Revenue Commissioner Elijah Mwandumbya told the ‘Daily News’ that the authority would conduct a special vetting exercise in the selection of local government staff who would permanently work as tax collectors.

Daily News