Africa-Press – Uganda. With a fiscal deficit of 5.6 percent in 2023, Uganda has increasingly turned to local resources to make up for revenue shortfall since the World Bank suspended funding last year over the Anti-Homosexuality Law.
Last month, traders in downtown Kampala protested against what they saw as high taxes and harsh enforcement tactics of the Uganda Revenue Authority.
Maria Jouste, who has researched Uganda’s tax system, including its taxing of small businesses, compliance rate, and personal income taxes, answers four questions.
What were the recent protests about?
Last month, traders in Kampala began protesting against high taxes and enforcement strategies of the Uganda Revenue Authority (URA).
Similar protests were seen in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania last year over high taxation and heavy-handed enforcement of levies on small businesses.
In Kampala, the protest centred on the electronic receipting and invoicing solution (EFRIS), a digital system designed to enhance value-added tax (VAT) collection by tracking and managing invoices and receipts.
Introduced in 2020, it was first enforced on large businesses. Enforcement for small and medium-sized businesses started in April 2024.
URA has not clearly stated how much it expects to collect from these measures but its actions are born out of high revenue targets, which might be too ambitious. Overly ambitious revenue targets can do more harm than good in terms of the social contract and poverty.
URA turned its focus on traders and VAT law enforcement after the country faced a decline in development aid. It is not clear how much Uganda has lost as result of the World Bank funding freeze, but government has recently indicated a plan to borrow $150m from China’s Exim Bank.
What is Uganda’s tax base?
Compared to many other countries, Uganda has a narrow tax base, with tax collections totalling less than 14 percent of gross domestic product (GDP).
The average for Sub-Saharan countries is 18 percent. A large share of economic activity is informal and untaxed.
In developed countries, collection rates are much higher. The UK, for example, collects roughly 40 percent of its GDP annually.
According to Afrobarometer, a pan-African independent research network that measures public attitudes on economic, political and social matters in Africa, only one million Ugandans pay tax, though 3.5m were registered as taxpayers at the end of 2022/23 financial year. This is a meager number for a country with Uganda’s population at almost 50 million.
The reasons why most of those registered don’t remit taxes are varied. First, URA campaigns to register, people but cannot enforce tax laws. Second, not all registered taxpayers are liable for taxes. Third, there’s a lack of tax education.
The country’s top 1,000 taxpayers contribute more than three-quarters of all tax revenue collections.
Most Ugandans are employed in the informal sector and government has not developed efficient ways of collecting taxes from them.
The informal sector accounts for over half of GDP and more than 80 percent of employment. Small and medium-sized businesses only pay the presumptive tax, which contributes less than 0.05 percent of tax revenues. Hence the tax enforcement project targets small and medium-sized businesses, employing the electronic system.
How effective is Uganda’s tax regime in raising money?
The tax regime is less effective than many of its Sub-Saharan counterparts.
The largest domestic revenue sources are VAT and excise duty (22 percent), pay-as-you-earn (18 percent) and corporate income tax (8 percent).
This is due to several factors, including generous tax incentives and tax holidays, which estimates show that revenue losses due to several corporate tax incentives peaked to $42 million in 2020, difficulty in taxing the rich, and widespread tax avoidance, where several multinationals pay much less corporate income tax than large domestic firms (as a share of profits) due to profit shifting outside Uganda.
Other factors are widespread informality, income distribution with a high share of low-income individuals (based on current tax law, most ordinary citizens are not liable for income taxes), inefficiencies, and corruption in tax collection services.
How fair or unfair is it?
Ugandans perceive that their tax regime is unfair, that government does not spend tax money fairly, and that tax officials are corrupt. The recent protests by traders illustrate how unfair small business owners believe the tax burden to be.
Fairness in taxation varies widely by perspective. In general, a progressive tax system – where the rate is higher for the rich than for low-income earners – is widely argued to be a fair system.
Uganda’s tax laws have elements of being progressive, particularly in personal income taxation.
We recently evaluated Uganda’s personal income tax and found it to be fairly progressive. URA has tried to improve tax collection from wealthy individuals but with uneven success.
A recent study documents many of the challenges in taxing the rich. This relative inability to enforce tax laws on the country’s wealthiest individuals suggests that the tax regime is somewhat unfair.
Generous tax incentives and holidays predominantly benefit large firms. Smaller businesses rarely qualify for these benefits.
The corporate statutory tax rate is 30 percent, but the estimated effective tax rate averages 14 percent across all firms and drops for the largest firms.
What needs to be reformed?
Uganda faces serious challenges in raising sufficient funds for public services and economic development. Key tax policies have remained unchanged for a decade. Personal income tax rates have been the same since 2012 and the value added tax threshold and presumptive tax thresholds since 2015.
Reforms on these issues should be considered to adjust for high inflation and the economic consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Business taxation also needs to be reformed. Recent studies on Uganda’s presumptive tax and small businesses suggest the taxation should be simplified.
Bigger revenue gains might be accomplished by focusing on large corporate taxpayers. For example, tax incentives should be reconsidered.
And greater transparency in public spending and service delivery can improve taxpayer morale and compliance.
Source: Monitor
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