This archive report was first published on 27 November 2019.
Harness Technology to Spur Tax Systems ¶
On November 27, 2019, President Yoweri Museveni opened the 4th International Conference On Tax In Africa, organised by the African Tax Administration Forum (ATAF), with a call to tax administrators to invest in modern technologies and build human resource capacity.
He noted that lack of integrity is among the biggest problems in the East African region, causing massive leakages when the countries needed all the revenues to develop. The President emphasized the need for tax administrators to put more emphasis on consumption tax and stop production tax that discourages entrepreneurship.
Mr. Museveni also highlighted the importance of conducting regular impact studies on new tax proposals, citing the example of several African countries that rushed to impose social media tax, which instead hurt local taxpayers more than platform providers.
He encouraged collaborations with other countries that have built sufficient expertise in taxation of digital economies, and suggested that the United Nations could be the eventual arbiter. The continent has young, educated, and abundant human resources that with the right intervention, can develop capacity not just for the continent but the entire world.
Mr. Museveni's words were a call to action for Africa to embrace change, invest in technology, create an enabling legal and regulatory framework, and take some risk. The practice of waiting and seeing what is happening elsewhere before doing it here is defeatist and retrogressive, as Africa has its own unique issues that can be addressed by solutions from no other place other than the continent.
