Mixed Reactions as Museveni Creates Task Force to Monitor URA

President Museveni has sparked mixed reactions following his creation of a new unit to oversee the operations of the Uganda Revenue Authority (URA).

The President created the State House Revenue Intelligence and Strategic Operations Unit with a mission to fight corruption within the URA.

This development was announced through a statement released by State House on July 5.

In the statement, the President appointed David Kalemera as a Senior Presidential Advisor and head of the unit. The government hopes to close revenue leakages and boost tax collections with this new unit.

URA concerns

Recently, the URA Commissioner General John Musinguzi revealed that Uganda loses revenue in the range of Shs4 trillion in uncollected taxes. Mr. Musinguzi attributed this to the lack of capacity to monitor the level of transactions in businesses.

Mr. Musinguzi’s Authority has also been under fire for their mode of enforcing tax compliance. According to many critics, URA should tone down their enforcement. The disagreement in URA’s model led businesses in Downtown Kampala to close for days in protest of their monitoring tools. The traders accused the taxpayer of double taxing them through the EFRIS platform.

URA maintained that EFRIS, the Electronic Fiscal Receipting and Invoicing Solution, is only meant to ensure real-time tracking of sales transactions. The protests got the attention of the President, who directed the waiver of penalties that traders had accumulated. URA has since opened a service center in the city center to help traders out.

There’s a belief that this and many other reasons could be behind the President’s decision to create a task force to monitor URA. The creation of the task force sparked debate on social media, with commentators both supporting and questioning its significance.

Those questioning the decision expressed concern about such task forces rendering existing agencies redundant. The President has a number of monitoring units within the precincts of State House. These have all been widely criticized for overlapping functions of existing agencies such as the Inspectorate of Government.