By Our Reporters
A man, who says lost his job at the Dewinton road-based foreign-owned car firm after reporting to URA tax evasion by his bosses, has reported to Commissioner General Dorris Akol, Parliament, the President and IGG Irene Mulyagonja calling on them to intervene and reverse or atone the injustice he has endured for the past so many years since tipping URA. He says to his dismay, staffers at URA Tax Investigations Department (TID) have treated him with hostility, indifference and contempt as if he did wrong to report tax evasion that could result in GoU recovering billions. He says when the impugned 4 companies were asked to do self-assessment advising URA on how much tax they had defaulted paying, they reported a much larger figure than what URA finally made them pay.
All in all the whistle blower is protesting the unpatriotic manner in which investigations has been handled, failure by URA staffers to conceal his identity and protect him as a whistle blower and most importantly the negligent manner in which his former employer’s tax liability has been assessed by the URA teams. He also faults Akol for ignoring all the letters he has been writing to her for all these years about the matter. In an apparent agreement with the President who recently wrote a letter accusing URA bosses of possible connivance with tax defaulting firms, the whistle blower tells Akol that he now believes in existence of possible collusion between his former employers and some URA staffers. Ironically some of the companies he accuses of tax evasion have big contracts supplying hundreds of brand new vehicles to mostly government Ministries, Departments & Agencies (MDAs). They also supply to a number of International NGOs and some UN agencies operating in Kampala. They have also previously supplied under AMISON in Somalia where they recently sold Ural trucks worth over USD17m. On Thursday we stumbled on Akol at the Finance Ministry where she had gone to attend a meeting. We told her about this whistle blower’s frustrations and she sounded alarmed and didn’t believe such could happen to a whistle blower but asked us to advise the gentleman to drive to House of Hope in Kamwokya/Kololo and report to URA staffers there. She specifically gave us the name of Mr. Mathew Mugabe but the clearly distraught whistle blower told us: “That one I’m not interested in him because I have been to him several times and I wasn’t helped at all.” For comments, call/text/WhatsApp us on 0703164755!
