Capital Ethiopia, Monday, 28 March 2011
The Ethiopian Revenue and Costume Authority (ERCA) has sealed shops and arrested traders in the past week due to illegal activity in related with VAT and cash machines.
Sources at Merkato, the largest market center of the country, told Capital that on Saturday March 19, the authority intelligence and federal police taskforce arrested dozens of traders because they were not using a cash register machine at their business. Others were arrested for trading without VAT, despite being VAT registered.
According to sources at ERCA, two weeks ago the authority took similar measures on traders who participated in illegal trading related with the tax system.
Sources said that, ERCA’s is enforcing the law on traders who are not registered for VAT and those trading with VAT.
Workers at Merkato said that about 28 traders were also arrested on Tuesday March 22, 2011 for similar reasons.
Officials from regulatory or public relations offices of the authority have not confirmed the situation. At different times ERCA has raided shop owners suspected of illegal trading activity and tax evasion.
In the first half of the fiscal year ERCA collected 25 billion birr, while the target was to collect 28.8 billion.
“The first six month’s performance met 86.74 percent of the target as we collected 25 billion from the 28.8 billion birr goal.
The reason for the underperformance is self declared tax statements that will be subject to audit and corrected accordingly.
Failure of some taxpayers to pay their self declared dues on time was another reason,” Epherem Mekonnen, communications manager of ERCA recently told Capital.
The federal government aimed higher for this year as part of a five year plan to take the latest tax and nontax related revenues to fourfold from last year’s 35.6 billion birr to 150.6 billion birr in the five year period. As part of this, ERCA was tasked to collect 54.1 billion this year. Currently the authority is working to expand tax revenue.
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