Night economy helps URA surpass its target

Kampala, Uganda | THE INDEPENDENT | URA has partly attributed the recent excessive revenue collection of the third quarter of the financial year 2021/22 to the resumption of the night economy and the full reopening of the entire economy.

Between January and March this year, URA collected 1,834.37 Billion Shillings against a target of 1,823.25 Billion Shillings, with a surplus of 11.11 Billion Shillings. This is its strongest quarterly performance for the year.

Ibrahim Bbosa, the assistant Commissioner of Public and Corporate Affairs says that the resumption of the nightlife, comes with a lot of excise duty and all of this was missed during the lockdown.

Bbosa adds that the reopening of the economy boosted collections from the Pay As You Earn-PAYE and Co-operate Tax, and this was so because people were coming back to life.

He adds that as the economy reopened, many companies filed their annual or half-year provisions corporate taxes, and for PAYE many more employers have started to be paid and this has contributed a lot because of the arrear recoveries.

Data from URA indicates that the tax body’s PAYE collections were 38.62 Billion Shillings and Corporate tax 25.09 Billion Shillings, which were the major surpluses registered in the quarter.

The domestic revenue collections were 1,147.36 billion shillings, which is 24.42 billion shillings lower than the 1,171.78 billion shillings targets in the same period. This is a 17.96 percent growth (174.70 billion shillings) in comparison to the same period in 2021.

Bbosa says that the customs collections also made a very good contribution to the quarter’s performances, mostly in the aspects of Value-Added Tax on imports, import duty, and the local excise duty on imports, and this is all due to the reopening.

Customs collections were 775.06 billion shillings against a target of 688.06 billion shillings, posting a surplus of 87.00 billion shillings, VAT on imports of 49.57 billion shillings, Petroleum duty 23.23 billion shillings, imports duty 8.88 billion shillings, and excise duty 5.57 billion shillings.

The government gave URA a target to collect 22.34 trillion shillings, and by the surplus collection from the previous quarter, the tax body is remaining with 7 billion which has to be collected between now and July if it is to hit its target, something they have failed for the last three years.

“Our performance last quarter shows a promising trend at least for the final quarter of the year, and that is why we are very optimistic that we should be able to reach our target of the year,” Bbosa explained.

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URN