IT Support Data Exchange Between Tax and Government Agencies

Tax evaders exploit the lack of communication between government and tax agencies to misreport their incomes. Within most African Tax administration where the self-assessment regime is in place, this problem would best be curbed through exchanging information to verify taxpayer declarations. By now, many government agencies use electronic information systems that collect diverse data that can be used to enforce compliance. Although this such automation has been a milestone at Uganda Revenue Authority (URA) and other government agencies in Africa, it is still hard to obtain data outside an agency or their country jurisdictions. If obtained, the data would give a more accurate compliance profile of a taxpayer. Current data exchange methods are manual, slow, ineffective and prone to flaws. This paper presents a data sharing framework for distributed tax information systems using a Service Oriented Architecture. It addresses the potential challenges to the implementation of this trust-based exchange framework and how they can be addressed. The results suggest that the service based framework may facilitate a cheaper seamless automatic exchange approach for taxpayer data using existing information systems.....

IT Systems that Drive Property Tax Compliance

The aim of this study was to develop spatial analysis approach to rental tax compliance by URA in Kampala. A URA staff and system investigation on the effectiveness of existing compliance monitoring methods was conducted. The findings indicate that URA staff consider the existing system incompetent to enforce the deserved compliance for rental tax within Kampala. This is because of the informal nature of Ugandan businesses and rental property ownerships which cannot warrant the desired compliance monitoring. It thus calls for stringent fiscal administrative policies that ensure that whoever hits the taxation threshold, remits their taxes and continues to do so without fail; as long as he continues to linger above the taxable threshold. Today, if well-administered, property business can be a huge source of rental tax. However, given the informal and nomadic nature of the economy, it may prove rather hard to locate properties let alone their owners. Consequently a new system that identifies non-compliance to rental tax in Kampala was designed, implemented and tested to the satisfaction of its users, the URA staff. The report concludes and recommends that URA adopts this spatial analysis tool, to gain from the redundant unexploited tax base at a lower administrative cost.