Good Financial Governance III in Zambia
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
Good Governance and Civil Society
Client: GIZ
Period: 07.2020 – 06.2021
Country: Zambia
Services
AMBERO Consulting has been commissioned to develop the baseline for implementation of the Mobile Tax Offices (MTO), with the objective to reach out to taxpayers and general public in remote areas of Zambia, as well as to taxpayers in densely populated cities. The services include the baseline study, development of business case, preparation of Technical requirements for procurement of Mobile Offices and Evaluation. The services provided are the following:
- Study on the State of the Art for Modes of Tax Service Deliveries in Sub Saharan Africa (SSA) to ensure that the MTO project is implemented in line with the current modes of delivery of ZRA and best practices and lessons learned on tax service delivery and MTO projects from the SSA region;
- Development of a Business Case for Mobile Service Offices, as a component of the Project Initiation Document (PID), using Prince2 Methodology.
- Procurement advisory: develop and draft ToRs for the Procurement of the Mobile Offices for Pilot Phase, based on the results of the business case calculating the contract’s value;
- Technical Support during MTO tender process: Answering bidder questions and consolidation of all bidding documents for evaluation.