Africa-Press – Botswana. The Botswana Unified Revenue Service (BURS) is confident of reaching a P60 billion revenue target come March 2024 when the current financial year comes to an end.
The taxman shared recently that having set a P60 billion target for the 2023/24 financial year, the tax agents have already collected as much as P32.9 billion which is about 56 percent of this year’s target.
In the previous financial year (2022/23), BURS surpassed the P47 billion target by 4.55 percent after bagging P49 billion.
Commissioner General Jeanette Makgolo said that if everything remains constant, BURS will surpass the target by 6 percent.
“Considering the importance of revenue collection to the fiscus, we have devised a revenue mobilisation strategy,” said Makgolo.
She noted that 70 percent of the budgeted government expenditure funding is expected from the revenue Service.
The BURS annual target is in line with Government’s fiscal consolidation plan and main objective of rebuilding fiscal buffers.
According to the Budget Strategy Paper (BPS) for 2024, come February 2024, the finance Minister will report a significant reduction in the country’s fiscal deficits. Official figures contained in the BPS, which is a pre-budget document prepared by Finance Ministry officials, shows that for the coming two consecutive financial years, the fiscal deficit is expected to go down by about 2.7 percent of GDP.
Botswana has struggled to balance its budget as far as the beginning of the National Development Plan 11 (NDP 11), weighed down by the recession in the diamond industry, which only started gaining momentum from 2021 and had its best performance in 2022.
For the financial year 2017/2018, the country overspent its budget by P1.9 billion, worsening in 2018/2019 with a P8.8 billion deficit. While the budget outruns seemed to be getting better with a P7.9 billion deficit in 2019/2020, the advent of COVID-19 pushed the deficit to P16.41 billion in 2020/2021. The budget outrun was greatly improved in the 2021/2022 fiscal year, bringing it down to P8 million budget deficit.
For the 2023/2024 financial year, government’s total revenues and grants are projected to reach P81.7 billion, while total expenditure and net lending expected to go as far as P87.4 billion, resulting in a budget deficit of P5.7 billion, or -2.0 percent of GDP.
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