The URA Tower is that milestone that every Ugandan must be proud of

By Ian Rumanyika

As His Excellence, the president of Uganda, Yoweri Museveni said when he was opening the 22 storied tower, our main mission is to facilitate business & assist the economy to grow.

The tower is that facility that will enable the tax administrators easily achieve that.

Under the Uganda Revenue Authority(URA) Tower we have pooled together specialized services to offer timely and quality services. A case in point is that we have the Tax investigators, tax auditors, valuation experts, litigators, debt collectors, IT experts, policy and business analysts among others in one place.

We have done magic of innovations while decentralized in the past, now imagine the wonders we are going to do for the taxpayer with these experts under one roof.

For the first time, we have full integration of the back office service to support the self service business model of e-transactions, under one roof, while maintaining only tax payers’ service centres in the CBD.

It is without a doubt that the tax collector will offer faster and better services to clients resulting from process integration while reducing administrative costs by over 40%.This is something all government institutions should benchmark on.

Taxpayers will be able to access all services in one location, at the state of the art service center. These will include registration, free tax advisory services on direct and indirect tax, imports and exports clearance, installment payment and faster tax refunds among others.

Overall this business model will reduce compliance costs and increase voluntary compliance.

In the first month of moving to the URA Tower, we have registered improvement in taxpayer and staff engagement, coordination of service delivery, enterprise resource management, bandwidth, efficient fleet management, security, improved teamwork, centralised analytics in URA reports and quick decision making.

This is the kind of efficiency you want any revenue authority to have.

The overall objective of this facility is to provide infrastructure for better service delivery and the strategy is to have all URA back office operation in Kampala, Mukono and Entebbe converge at Nakawa in the proposed headquarter building.

This is expected to reduce the cost of doing business for taxpayers through provision of one-stop-service-centre besides the shs7 billion savings on rent, savings on transport, ICT connectivity, and security and courier services for URA among others.

And of course as mentioned by many, the tallest building will improve the URA corporate image in Africa.

URA has been the only administration body in the East African Community without a befitting headquarters building.

Let us embrace development in our country. Not forgetting that this building was fully funded by the taxpayer and as a taxpayer, I am proud of the steps we are taking.

Developing Uganda Together.

The writer is the manager in charge of public and corporate affairs at Uganda Revenue Authority(URA).