By Immaculate Wanyenze
Following a successful symposium held in 2021on threats affecting intelligence information collection on economic crime, the URA and representatives from different Government Ministries, Departments Agencies, Law enforcement agencies and Intelligence organizations met and agreed on a strategic approach to address vice.
Yesterday, they signed a Memorandum of Understanding at Kampala Serena Hotel to strengthen institutional collaboration and constitute a multi-agency working group to tackle economic crime challenges such as; tax evasion, money laundering, illicit financial flows, cyber threat intelligence among others.
“Today we hope to leverage on the support of a robust professional team to develop a framework that will drive an integrated and government approach towards fighting economic crime,” Denis K. Kateeba, the Commissioner Tax investigations affirmed in his remarks.
In addition, John Musinguzi, the Commissioner General explained that financial crimes are now getting sophisticated and can only be confronted with joint effort of other government agencies. Some of these URA is working with include; Financial Intelligence Authority, State House Anti-Corruption unit, Bank of Uganda, Uganda Communications Commission, External Security Organization, Internal Security Organization, Director of Public Prosecution, Chieftaincy of Military Intelligence, Uganda Peoples’ Defence Forces, Directorate of Immigration under the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Crimes Intelligence, Uganda Prisons and Uganda Wildlife Authority.
“If you take an example of the illicit financial flows, out of this great continent of Africa, they are estimated to be between 50-60 billion U.S dollars per annum. This is a continent where the debt to GDP ratio is growing in excess of 60% meaning that the current and future generations are coming into existence already carrying such a heavy weight of debt because a lot of the resources that would be here to develop our continent continue to be smuggled out of our continent,” Musinguzi explained of how detrimental economic crime is.
Ambassador Joseph Ocwet, the Director General of External Security Organisation thanked URA for organizing the symposium which is very critical to ensuring security in this country.
He revealed that economic crime is usually led by individuals who are enemies of the state and most of them are foreigners usually connected to terrorism.
“As the security agency, we welcomed the idea to fight economic crime by coming together, sharing information, collecting the best intelligence and of course using the modern technology to fight the crime. We are also working with URA to also secure our borders because part of the crime is through smuggling”, Ambassador Ocwet said.
David Muhoozi, the Minister of State for Internal Affairs ‘s remarks were not different from Ambassador Ocwet. The Minister praised URA for hosting a broad spectrum of critical players in tackling the crime. He however, challenged them to add the Judiciary for quick prosecution of criminals.
He also noted that some of the key economic crimes that are impacting on the stability of Uganda are; corruption, smuggling, drug trafficking, counterfeits, terrorism financing and tax evasion.
