TRA collects 97.5pc of 2019/20 quarterly target
Dar es Salaam. The Tanzania Revenue Authority (TRA) missed the set revenue collection target by 2.5 percent during the second quarter of the 2019/20 financial year that ended on December 31, 2019.
The TRA commissioner general, Dr Edwin Mhede, said yesterday that a total of Sh4.97 trillion was collected in October, November and December last year, which is equivalent to 97.5 percent of the set Sh5.1 trillion target.
The amount, therefore, makes the half of on-going financial year’s revenue collections by TRA to be Sh9.2 trillion.
However, the amount was below 50 percent of the Sh19.1 trillion targeted revenue collections for the 2019/20 financial year as announced by the minister for Finance and Planning, Dr Philip Mpango, when presenting the budget in Parliament last June.
This means the taxman will have the pressing job of collecting the remaining Sh9.9 trillion in the coming six months to June 2020.
Dr Mhede said revenue collected during the last quarter of this financial year increased by 19.78 percent compared with the Sh4.15 trillion collected in a similar period in FY-2018/2019.
The TRA chief also revealed that, in December last year, the collections were 100.20 percent of the targeted amount.
“Our target was to collect Sh1.983 trillion in December - but ended up getting Sh1.987 trillion. This is the highest score since the establishment of TRA,” he said.
Dr Mhede explained that the authority collected Sh1.484 trillion in October and Sh1.501 trillion in November 2019, equivalent to 93.98 percent and 97.59 percent of their targets respectively.
He, however, did not specify how much was collected as taxes and non-taxes.
Dr Mhede said such achievements were due to enforcement of existing tax laws and regulations, plugging tax evasion loopholes, increased education to tax payers, regulating the use of Electronic Fiscal Devices (EFDs) and improving services.
“We recently conducted a national tax education programme whereby we met with taxpayers and reminded them of the importance of paying taxes for the development of the economy,” he told a press conference in Dar es Salaam yesterday.
He said the TRA target now is to sustainably maintain the performance well into the future, banking hopes on digital application in tax collections.
“In the next five years, I want to see TRA is rooted in ICT technologies in its daily operations. I hope that, through digital transformation, we can widen our tax base,” he said.
In late December last year, TRA introduced an online platform for auctioning uncustomed goods, to replace the open auctioneering as part of fighting collusion between unscrupulousTRA officials and bidders.
Dr Mhede said the online platform allows more bidders in Tanzania and beyond to participate in auctions - at the same time doing away with middlemen.
“We started online auctioning last year, and we will continue to shift our operations onto digital platforms,” he noted.
According to him, there are several digital platforms which are being designed including e-profiling.
E-profiling, according to him, is a web-based platform that will list all individuals with their annual turn-over status - resulting the payment of taxes, accordingly.
Speaking during the presentation of the state of the economy for 2019 in Dodoma on Tuesday, Finance and Planning Minister Mpango said the government collected Sh1.05 trillion from 79 government institutions and corporations out of 266 in the 2018/19 financial year.
He said that the remaining 187 have yet to disburse their income distributions, amounting Sh19.6 billion, as directed by President Magufuli.
On foreign budget support, Dr Mpango revealed that out of Sh2.7 trillion pledged by development partners during the on-going financial year, only Sh1.1 trillion has been released.
He said during the five months of this financial year (from July to November 2019), the government spent a total of Sh8.7 trillion on recurrent expenditure - which was 97.8 percent of the target - and Sh3.1 trillion, or 61.7 percent of the target.
