By Immaculate Wanyenze
Uganda Revenue Authority(URA) in partnership with Uganda Law Society(ULS) braved the hustle and bustle of Nakawa market as they courted the Nakawa community on their legal rights and tax potential.
The engagement was arranged for the traders in Nakawa to interact with them at a personal level on their legal issues ranging from land, succession, writing wills, contracts, business and family issues. The URA hub was also testament to Nakawa ’s value as one of the major sources of tax.
Agnes Nampazze,47 a tomato vendor in Nakawa was one of URA clients at the hub. She hoped that her family land issues that had stalled for years would be solved. Nampazze narrated that at the age of 16, together with her mother and cousin, they purchased land jointly. Unfortunately, her cousin went ahead and completed the purchase and took over the land.
Since then, there has been a lot of quibbling with no success. These and more legal queries is what the URA legal team and ULS sought to address as they engaged traders at the two-day hub in Nakawa market. The hub was part of the annual pro-bono day for ULS to offer free legal services to Nakawa traders.
Through the Tujenge bus, traders were also equipped with tax education skills on tin acquisition, financial literacy, payment of Advance Income Tax, registration of motorcycle vehicles among other services.
According to Diana Prida Praff, the Supervisor Litigation in the URA Legal Services Department, the market community are key stakeholders to the growth of the economy because of the different businesses they operate.
“The URA team has a pro bono engagement held annually in-house but this year, we partnered with other lawyers from ULS to complement the tax education services with free legal services to our neighbours in Nakawa market,” Prida explained of the engagement.
For URA, engaging the Nakawa market group was another way of bringing services closer to people to not only improve their social life but ease their compliance.
Currently, URA is advocating for Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) as one of the mechanisms for enhancing disputes and improving service delivery to taxpayers. This tool has been very instrumental in reducing the amount of revenue that would have been held up in court cases in the Tribunal and courts of law.
