By Irene Kabakama
URA has met with different business leaders from the Kampala Central Business District to discuss ways of increasing rental tax collections in the city.
In a meeting that happened at the URA headquarters in Nakawa last Friday, Commissioner General John Musinguzi expressed dismay over the low levels of compliance by city landlords. This, he said, despite the technology that was deployed to improve rental tax collections.
“Let us rethink the strategy; we can only succeed if we go to the people that pay this rent because URA is suffering as well as the country because of inefficiency with this tax head,” Musinguzi said about finding solutions to improve rental tax collections.
In the last financial year, URA collected Ugx 215.10bn in rental tax against a target of Ugx 171.09bn, performing at a rate of 125.72%. Despite this impressive performance, the taxman argues that collections from this tax head could improve immensely if all property owners complied.
This has pushed URA to devise strategies to ensure all landlords earning rental income are within the taxpaying bracket, hence enlisting the support of business leaders to help identify the non-compliant ones. Mr. Musinguzi invited the leaders to join URA in a head count exercise to ascertain the number of commercial buildings in the city.
This is to be done in conjunction with using data from the KCCA to ensure accurate coverage and the RippleNami system, which integrates data from specific government ministries, departments, and agencies and matches properties to their true individual or corporate owners within the URA tax register.
“We shall consult KCCA to provide us with the lists of the commercial buildings so that the officers in the field will be ticking off the list to ensure all of them are covered,” Musinguzi noted.
During the meeting, the leaders promised to furnish URA with information on the actual rent paid by tenants, which they allege landlords hide in fake receipts.
URA will also hold a tax education engagement with commercial building owners on Wednesday this week to address the information gap that could be hindering their compliance.
They will then be introduced to the idea of voluntary disclosure, where those who have been defaulting will be given a few days to comply. “For those who won’t comply, URA will apply the law,” Musinguzi emphasized.yu
