Our Member, GT Uganda: On the spree of Tax compliance administration reforms

Uganda Revenue Authority (URA) has announced the introduction of an electronic platform called Electronic Fiscal Receipting and Invoicing System (EFRIS) and it will start operating with the financial year 2020/21. According to URA, it’s an initiative under the Domestic Revenue Mobilization Strategy (2019/20-2023/24) and it will be used by all taxpayers in the country to manage issuance of e-receipts and e-invoices.

The new legislation is aimed to address challenges such as suppression of sales, non-issuance of tax receipts or invoices, curb false refund claims, fictitious purchases with no physical movement of goods and unverifiable claims by taxpayers due to loss of records.

Implementation of these regulations have received mix responses from the public at large due to infrastructure challenges prevailing in the country as well as the expectation of the authority to manage stock module in the system for traders and manufacturers in the country. The closest counterparts of Uganda i.e. Tanzania and Kenya are already having the e-Invoices system in the country. However, the scope of the same in both these countries are currently limited to issuance of the e-Invoices only. Responding to these challenges positively, URA has postponed the implementation of EFRIS to January 1, 2021 which was planned initially from July 1, 2020.

In addition, the tax authority has implemented the Digital Tracking solutions known as Digital Tax stamps as a mechanism of identifying manufactured products and improving tax administration on them.