ZRA committed to mobilising domestic revenues - official
By BUUMBA CHIMBULU
THE Zambia Revenue Authority (ZRA) is committed to playing its rightful part in mobilisation domestic resources to enhance the country’s financial independence, director domestic taxes, Joseph Nonde, has said.
Mr. Nonde said the authority’s efforts were also meant to enable Government achieve the 7th National Development Plan and the 2030 vision of transforming Zambia into a middle-income economy.
He also said ZRA had recognised the need to engage more tax payers in an open forum where the authority would assist clients how to interact with the systems.
“Tax collection or tax administration has two basic principles which are compliance and enforcement. Our call to Zambians is to change the mind-set, we need to develop a culture of paying taxes and set our great country on a greater economic development agenda,” he said.
He was speaking in Lusaka yesterday at the tax payer education workshop on ZRA systems interaction.
Mr. Nonde also said the authority was aware that it could only achieve 100 percent compliance by educating and training clients on how to interact with domestic tax system which was the Tax Online.
He observed that ZRA was aware that most of the participants at the workshop were Small and Medium Enterprises (SME’s), and that ZRA believed that small businesses could play a huge role in fighting poverty and unemployment.
“We have recognized that our entrepreneurs have registered businesses, but they don’t know how to file the returns online hence filling the returns manually which takes long for them to be updated on the system,
“This workshop is just part of the many activities lined up for 2018 in our communications strategy. We have a robust communications strategy that we have already rolled out for below the line activities. Soon we shall roll out the mass awareness for mass media,” he said.