Uganda Revenue Authority (URA) has partnered with Makerere University to nurture future voluntary compliant tax payers in a four-day training targeting 600 final year students from the College of Business and Management Sciences (CoBAMS).
Dr. Ismail Kintu, a lecturer from the Department of Accounting and Finance said the tax training is premised to the fact that many students go to the field without hands-on skills.
“The training is intended to impart practical skills among the students to enable them help their parents, employers and themselves when they become active tax payers in filing returns to URA,” he said.
The training started on Saturday, October 28 and is going to run for four weekends ending on Sunday, November 4 under the theme, “Fostering voluntary tax compliance among Ugandan youths”
Dr Kintu called for more trainings like this and he believes if these sessions are conducted for young people, sensitizing the citizens to pay taxes will be easy.
He lauded the College Management and special applaud to the principal Prof Eria Hisali for always supporting initiatives of equipping students with skills and noted that the tax training is targeting students doing Business related courses because they study taxation as a course unit in their programs.
URA trains students to register and get Tax Identification Number (TIN), to read and navigate the URA portal and get any tax information they need, filing the returns especially the Value Added Tax (VAT) returns via the Electronic Fiscal Receipt and invoicing System (EFRIS) that are on the monthly basis.
URA officials trains the students on October 30th at CoBAMS
The program started in 2019 with 700 students and this is the third cohort of the training and at the end of it, URA issues students with a certificate upon assessment and attaining a 70% pass rate.
Dr Kintu has encouraged students to always look out for new information especially about tax since all fields have to pay tax once they start earning income and asked this year’s participants to be ambassadors and take on the training to other students who missed the opportunity.
Andrew Kyakonye, the Tax Education Officer at URA who spearheaded the training said this year, URA is looking at how students can be exposed to the job market, taking them through URA processes like registration, and Business Formalization, delving into how they can register their businesses for taxes and taking them through the processes of registering their businesses and the one of their prospective clients when they go out to the field.
On the same note, the program is also looking at returns filing where tax payers are expected to declare how they have performed throughout the year.
“Our target is basically on students in their final year because they are the one who will be required to issue the e-receipts and filling tax returns of their clients.” He explained.
During the same session, the students will learn Electronic Fiscal Receipting and Invoicing Solution (EFRIS), an online system that helps in record keeping and issuing of on-time receipts.
“With this new web-based forms, the tax payers will be able to use EFRIS full time and they will not need to file their tax returns because the system keeps on updating the information with just a clique of the button.” He added.
URA has trained over 1000 students of Makerere University in the past two trainings in 2019 and 2022.