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Zambia and Gambia have signed an agreement aimed at, among others things, sealing revenue leakages in all tax types, including the Value Added Tax which has proved to be a challenge on the African continent.
The Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed in Lusaka on Thursday, was sealed by the Zambia Revenue Authority (ZRA) and the Gambia Revenue Authority (GRA).
At the signing ceremony, the ZRA Commissioner-General, Dingani Banda, noted the need to leverage on technology in tax administration to mitigate revenue leakages.
“We need to believe that we can provide solutions to our problems and fortunately we are living in a time where technology is available to us, the same technology that is available in developed countries.
“There is now a huge opportunity for us to leverage on the knowledge in terms of skills that the market provides, the technology available to us and develop solutions that will address our problems,” Banda said.
Read more: Over 200 cases under investigations for VAT fraud —Zambia Revenue Authority
On the MoU, Banda said it was the manifestation of the South to South cooperation for enhanced domestic revenue collection as the anchor for development and poverty alleviation on the African continent.
Earlier, GRA Commissioner-General, Yankuba Darboe, said African countries were at a level where they needed to work hard in terms of mobilising the needed revenue for their governments.
Darboe was confident that enhanced revenue collection will assist African countries not to rely on external sources to have revenue for development for their countries.
“I believe that we can get there, if only we try to change the way of our operations in terms of using the manual systems of collecting revenue but rather we try to digitalise our systems. This is going to close up all the leakages that are within the systems, we have to level up.
“The reason why we are collecting a certain amount of revenue of our country is that we have not gone full digitalisation. The way we are going is the way forward. Once we are able to digitalise, most of our operation, you will realise that the leakages will be minimum and finally more collection of revenue of our countries,” he said.
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