By Our Reporters
The Commissioner General (CG) of URA Dorris Akol has spoken out on the entity’s expanded mandate that recently saw the Finance Ministry assign the tax body to immediately take over the collection of tuition fees for all Universities that are government-owned.
In an earlier story published by Mulengera news, Ag PSST Patrick Ochailap (whose Finance Ministry directly supervises URA) explained that tuition fees collection is part of the Non Tax Revenues (NTRs) which URA can be delegated to collect on behalf of GoU.
He said the same Finance Ministry that had delegated Makerere and other public Universities to collect tuition fees on its behalf is the one that has transferred the assignment to URA.
He defends the decision as one that will enhance efficiency and transparency besides stamping out fraud and eliminate criminal loss of government revenue that University officials would connive to divert.
In an interview with Mulengera news, Akol said URA is ready to begin executing the additional assignment immediately because all the necessary technical know-how, the human and technological resources are in place-and the entity is only waiting for July to immediately hit the ground running.
“All that needs to be done is merely uploading the entity [in this case Makerere and other Public Universities] onto the e-tax payment platform and begin working immediately. Even when this superficially seems like additional work to URA, we don’t need recruitment of additional staff because all the necessary infrastructure is in place. The only area that might necessitate additional manpower is when it comes to the auditing of risk to revenue which also doesn’t have to be done very often except in cases where we have detected high risk to revenue,” Akol explained in an interview at her Nakawa offices.
Asked whether it wasn’t too much taking on Public Universities (which are home to hundreds of thousands of students) and UWA park fees collection at the same time, Akol said URA wouldn’t be overwhelmed in anyway because this is work they have been doing for an eternity.
In the case of the Public Universities, she explained that the commercial banks Makerere has been using will remain the collecting agents except that the collection account names will now change from Makerere into URA collection account and beyond that, nothing much is going to change.
URA will be only charged with collecting the tuition and not with determining fees payment policy and payment deadlines. Ochailap says when it becomes appropriate, URA (which he says has lots of capabilities) could be assigned even the collection of school fees for primary and secondary schools that are government-owned. (For comments, email us on mulengera2040@gmail.com).
