Zambia Revenue Authority Commissioner General Kingsley Chanda has said tax authorities in Africa need to collaborate and share information to ease the identification of tax evasion attempts.
He said at the on-going Africa Mining Indaba on Tuesday that ZRA is also facing challenges with auditing some companies as some put records in a foreign language.
“In our country, we even have another challenge where a certain part of our business community even keeps records in different languages. I won’t mention here, where when you go to the audit, you find that the records are just some characters. So that, apart from just the technology itself, even the way taxpayers keep their records, if it’s not standardized, it becomes a serious problem but one way of standardizing that we have done in our country is to legislate the kind of accounting packages that you should have for tax purposes,” Mr. Chanda said.
He said tax authorities in most African countries do not have reliable ICT systems.
“So auditing mining companies or ascertaining their profitability becomes a challenge and that is why you have seen countries in Africa moving towards simpler tax systems like focusing on mineral royalty taxes which are based on production. We have had countries like even ours where we have even made mineral royalty tax non-deductible so that when its paid, it is the final tax. But more crucially it’s for tax authorities and their governments to invest a lot in ICT systems for tax authorities because that’s the only way we are going to be able to deal with some of these challenges,” Mr. Chanda said.
Tax avoidance and evasion are what lead to poverty. Nothing else. Kz
And corruption?
SURE
But Chanda is a fuool, truly a PF.
How many rows and columns on a profit and loss ledger that ZRA can’t translate from Chinese to his bemba language? These idyots need to before 2021.
KC is spot on
What a lame excuse. Who is in charge here??????
Chanda, you can surely do better than this. This simply means the same companies are non-compliant. You mean a foriegner can come in the country where English is the official language and they start doing business in their home language using characters as you put it? It means they are hiding something. These are non other than the Chinese and you are scared to mention them as CEO. Can you go to their country and conduct business and make entries in Bemba? Common man you are doing a disservice to the nation. If I were you I would resign before bieng fired. Wankalifya umutima san ewe Chanda.
We seriously need an economic indaba lyk yday. So some companies can have accounting packages in Hindi, Cantonese etc in Zed. .? Yet upcoming local companies are harassed into liquidation for political “correctness”…!!! Shocking
Kikiki!!! Ati-characters – which characters do we have in English language as official language. These are great lame excuses no one can entertain at any level of intelligence.
What a disaster!!! Ati ndise maboss just eating and doing nothing tangible.
While on the topic, you should have also highlighted how tax payers money, when misused, on super jets, million-dollar ambulances and billion-dollar roads… causes poverty.