Unique Tax Clearing Window Operational In December

By Nformi Sonde Kinsai & Leocadia Bongben

The Director General of Taxes, Laurent Nkodo, has disclosed that a single tax clearing window, meant to ease the ordeal tax payers go through, would go operational in December.

The revelation was made during the conference of Commonwealth Tax Association, CATA, as participants from close to some 40 countries shared best practices in tax administration in Yaounde last week. 

Tax payers presently move from one unit to the other in order to pay their taxes with inherent stress, poor customer reception, extortion and time wasting.In a presentation, a Tax Inspector, John Kinyuy, maintained that the present move is in line with the modernisation of the taxation department with reforms to streamline and simplify the process to allow users to accomplish tax payment and equally enable tracking of tax evaders.

In this vein small and medium size tax centres have been created responding to a new management system- by objectives, he said. He evaluated income from taxes to be on the increase from FCFA 166.6 billion in 1992 to FCFA 930 billion in 2007 with the on going reforms.

To achieve this goal of a single tax clearing window, certain reforms have been carried out in accordance with the organisational chart of the Ministry of Finance, raising the computer unit to a department and the creation of a research and reform department to track evolutions amongst others.

Recognising the role of the new information and communication technologies, ICT, the directorate of taxation has envisaged the installation of an integrated computer application system with unique identifier software.Kinyuy maintained that the present system is unreliable as a missing file can create problems in the system given the poor information storage system.

The ICT structure of taxation projects interconnectivity of different departments from an optic fibre provided by Camtel. Though there are isolated service units, application programmes with an interface would enable them to function together. He said through the system it would be possible to have information on all the tax payers from all the tax centres without having to move.

Though problems such as the enormous cost of such a programme cropped up, taxation experts were of the opinion that with the go ahead received from the Minister of Finance, the funds would be made available. Training for staff is equally envisaged though; the security challenge has to be constantly examined at the brink of the computer revolution.