RRA launches M-Declaration

A big number of small-and-medium businesses evade or avoid taxes every year, according to the Rwanda Revenue Authority (RRA). However, small business owners always claim that it is difficult for them to declare taxes on time or even to declare them, due to a number of constraints.

This will soon change once RRA launches a new platform, M-Declaration, next week to improve tax collection from micro-businesses. According to the tax body, the platform will make tax declaration easy for over 50,000 micro-businesses, most of which often slip-through the tax net year after year. Through the M-Declaration platform, micro-businesses with annual turnover of between Rwf 2m and Rwf 500m will declare taxes using their mobile telephones.

“This system will solve the problem of tax-payers spending hours in queues at our offices waiting to declare taxes. In fact, tax-payers will be able to declare their returns from wherever they will be using their mobile phones,  the RRA commissioner for domestic taxes, said. All that a business needs, according to Bumbakare, is a mobile phone, an identity card number, for nationals, or a passport number, for foreign investors, and a tax-payer identification number.

“The system will match these three requirements and enable the client to declare taxes by following prompts on their phone….