Context
The Zambia Revenue Authority (ZRA) has the mandate of levying and collecting taxes and strives to ensure that the compliance costs are as low as possible. Nevertheless, the ZRA does not have a presence in every district in Zambia. The citizens have constraints to access to public services, specifically tax services, and as its ability to comply with tax regulations. Therefore, mobile offices have been identified as a key strategy in: trying to reach out to taxpayers (in densely populated cities) and potential taxpayers (specially in places where there is no presence), lowering compliance costs for taxpayers and subsequently improve voluntary compliance, increasing revenue collection and offering additional opportunities for tax payer education.
Project description
The Good Financial Governance (GFG) Programme supports the enhancement of transparency, accountability, efficiency and responsiveness to citizens’ needs of financial governance in Zambia and does contribute to improved domestic resource mobilization (DRM).
The target intervention areas for the GFG III align with the Public Financial Management (PFM) Reform Strategy 2019-2022 of the Government of the Republic of Zambia (GRZ): (1) integrated planning and budgeting, (2) effective internal control for predictable budget execution, (3) increased effectiveness of revenue mobilisation, (4) transparent reporting of financial and service delivery performance and (5) moving towards fiscal decentralization.
On the component of improving DRM, GFG supports the Zambia Revenue Authorithy (ZRA) to create the preconditions to increase revenue collection on three main intervention areas: taxation of large enterprises, digital tax data analysis and tax service delivery. On Tax Service Delivery, GFG supports on:
- Electronic Queue Management Systems (EQMS)
- USSD based tax service application / TaxOnphone
- Tax service application for mobile phones / TaxOnapp
- Mobile Tax Offices / TaxOnroad