Uganda Revenue Authority Process Mapping

Uganda Revenue Authority (URA) wishes to consolidate the benefits of recent reforms, and is particularly interested in further reducing the administrative and compliance costs of dealing with taxes [including but not limited to those measured through the Doing Business (DB) report], streamlining key procedures, as well as further improving taxpayer services. This will be beneficial both for taxpayers in Uganda as well as for the URA, in terms of rationalizing its own administrative effort. In addition, the proposed process mapping work also forms part of the wider East African Community tax harmonization program, led mostly by the EAC Commissioners General (EACCG) through the East African Revenue Authorities Technical Committees (EARATC).

It will build a qualitative and quantitative benchmark of key tax procedures that will be comparable across the EAC region, and which may be harmonized through the EAC Secretariat as it will deem fit for the region.

Apex Consulting was engaged by IFC to to re-engineer the key revenue processes in Uganda. Re-engineered processes include General Sales Tax, Income Tax, payroll tax, and customs.

Responsibilities include:

• Conduct desk research. Review pertinent laws, regulations, manuals, and guidelines.
• Identify the key regulatory institutional stakeholders who interface with the tax processes.
• Develop detailed process maps of the current situation (as-is maps).
• Develop a costing model to identify the cost of providing each service by the URA to taxpayers
• Develop simplification/re-engineering process maps, building on the findings specified in the initial process mapping (as-is) in addition to observations, findings, and concerns observed by the consultants in the process of consultation with the beneficiaries such as bottlenecks, weak links, and poorly defined steps as well as improvements and simplification recommendations.