BY IRENE KABAKAMA
Alhaji Jaffer Abdallah, the National Chairman of the Uganda Clearing Industry and Forwarding Association (UCIFA) visited the John Musinguzi, the Commissioner General of URA to discuss the plight clearing and forwarding firms in Uganda face as they push for compliance. The meeting was also intended to improve relations and information sharing between the UCIFA association and URA.
Speaking at the URA offices, where he made a courtesy call, on Friday, Alhaji Jaffer raised a number of issues on behalf of the association for URA to solve. Some of these included; to allow UCIFA train its agents and URA provides the facilitators, continued exaggeration of assessments from URA, delay in granting Tax Clearance Certificates which affects their working capital and the need to automate all licensing processes for Agents.
The Commissioner General, John R. Musinguzi in response recognized the good working relationship with the Clearing fraternity and assured the team of all the support.
“URA will facilitate trade because it gives us taxes which build our country and it is a unifying factor for all of us to liberate our country,” Musinguzi assured the representatives of the Clearing fraternity.
He also asked the clearing agents to embrace EFRIS so as to improve some of their business inefficiencies like record keeping. He promised continuous meetings to discuss the issues hindering the smooth flow of work.
Meanwhile, a similar meeting had been held between the URA Customs Management team and representatives from UCIFA, Federation of Uganda Customs Agents and Freight Forwarders (FUCAFF) and Uganda Freight Forwarders Association (UFFA) to help streamline their partnership with a focus on increased information sharing to ease their compliance.
