Monitor calls, money transactions - President Museveni directs URA

All these years, Uganda has been losing billions of shillings in revenue from telecommunication companies under declaring the number of calls their subscribers make to the Uganda Revenue Authority, President Yoweri Museveni has said.
This, according to President Museveni, means the telecommunication firms have, for years, been paying less taxes than what they should actually be remitting.

According to the Ministry of Finance statistics, active telephone subscribers are now 22.4 million, with the phone penetration (tele density) growing by 53 per cent in 2015 to 66.9 million as of last year — 2017.

Mr Museveni now wants URA to monitor all calls made and received from within the country. Thereafter, the records should be used to determine the rightful taxes that the telecommunication firms should pay.

Without mentioning any specific telecommunication company, the President directed that such evasion (under declaration) should be nipped in the bud with technology. He argues that the vice has persisted for so long is because it has always been up to the telecommunication companies to declare what they think is due to government coffers rather than the other way round.
“Telephone calls should be electronically monitored because telecommunication companies have been under declaring calls,” President Museveni said at the closure of the first Science Model Workshop hosted by URA last week on Friday in Munyonyo, Kampala.

He continued: “Tax collectors would depend on the telecommunication companies who would under declare. For example if 5 million calls have been made, they would declare 3 million. Some of them would even treat calls from abroad as local calls because East Africa has one network area. So they must be monitored electronically.”

However, Daily Monitor has established that beginning this financial year, all calls are already being electronically monitored after the government procured the equipment to do so.

In an interview, without divulging much details, URA Commissioner for Investigations, Mr Patrick Mukiibi, confirmed that the government is already monitoring all calls made and that the records of that will be used to determine the tax that the telecom companies should pay.

In the same event whose theme was, “The Evolution of Science in Tax Administration,” the President further proposed several ways on how science can be applied to enhance compliance including directing that all the country’s entry and exit points be installed with scanners that detect undeclared goods which results in revenue loss.

He also directed that electronic monitoring should also be applied to money transfer as it is another area where government can tap revenue. With the number of Mobile money subscribers increasing from 2.8 million in 2011 to 23 million in 2017, Mr Museveni said it does no harm if a small percentage of that is taxed to provide the much needed security and other social goods.

REVENUE
Top 5 taxpayers. MTN and Airtel are in the top five tax payers list, according to a confidential list from URA. The two combined pay no more than Shs700 billion every year mostly as a result of Pay as You Earn deductions.