ZAMTEL starts clearing ZRA tax bill
By MAILESI BANDA ZAMTEL has paid K12 million to the Zambia Revenue Authority (ZRA)towards their historical debt liability bringing the total to K93 million paid to dismantle both historical and current liabilities, Zamtel,chief executive officer, Sydney Mupeta has announced.
Mr. Mupeta said of the K93 million, K61 million was for historical debt dated back to about five years while the K32 million was for current tax liabilities.
Speaking during the occasion to mark the tax payment by Zamtel to ZRA yesterday, Mr. Mupeta said it was important for state-owned enterprises to be tax complaint, adding that Zamtel hoped to complete payments for the arrears in 2018.
“The bulk of the tax debt being paid is very historical and as Zamtel, we remain committed to ensuring that this tax burden is completely dismantled. We are happy to be fulfilling this pledge today,” he said.
Mr. Mupeta disclosed that the company was on course with the $280 million investment aimed at improving their service delivery to the clients.
“We are on course with our $280 million investment that will give us the best network coverage that the country has even seen. We have started implementing our first 100 sites out of the 1, 009 sites, this will give our fixed customers 4.5G with speed of up to 240Mbps,” he said.
And ZRA commissioner general, Kingsley Chanda says compliancy to paying taxes will reduce Government’s burden to borrow for domestic spending.
He appealed to Government parastatals and other businesses to emulate Zamtel and build public confidence from their customers by paying their taxes adding that while ZRA had the capacity to collect tax debt companies should practice compliance. “Tax collection has two basic principles, compliance and enforcement. Tax payers have to be compliant but if they fail to comply, ZRA will apply the second principle which is enforcement,” Mr Chanda said.