By Maimuma Sey-Jawo
Yankuba Darboe, Commissioner General for Gambia Revenue Authority has disclosed that currently GRA has collected 95% of its 2021 Annual revenue Target of D12.8Billion.
With confidence, he said before the end of the year, surely GRA will attain the 2021 annual Revenue Target as the authority tasked by the government.
He praised GRA staff for their hard work, commitment and professionalism in the execution of their duties. Also, he commended the public enterprise companies for their voluntarily tax compliant without which GRA might find it very difficult to collect billion of dalasi on a monthly basis.
CG Darboe emphasized on GRA primary role which is to collect the much-needed revenue for the government. “Whatever we are doing if we are not performing the revenue collection task then we will be questioned,” he disclosed.
According to him, a lot of people outside there did not understand how GRA operate, “we as Revenue Authority always have a contract with government and in implementing this contract, and we involved our development partners both World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF). Meaning before the beginning of every New Year, we will sit as Revenue Authority with government and annual revenue target will be setup for GRA to implement,” he revealed.
He added that this target does not come blindly it is based on statistic that they have on the ground and also it based on the formulas that we use.
The Commissioner General went on that every target that comes in has a base and connection somewhere, once the target is agree between GRA and the government, it becomes GRA primary role to make sure that such target is collected for the government.
He said government has programmes and the programmes are based on the availability of the revenue, so it becomes a very serious issue once the target is agree, which the authority take upon themselves and make sure they meet up with the target.
As a result of the pandemic “It has been a very difficult situation for us like any other place in the past 2 years because of Covid -19,” he lamented.
In his explanation, “when Covid-19 came we realized that the borders where closed, the airport was close, trade was a problem as most of the businesses were closed and we get our money from the people, from the businesses, if the businesses are not working where do you expect us to get the revenue, so this becomes very difficult.”
“The money we collect from tourist industries was totally zero, is from this industries we have PAYE from the staff that are there, and we do have cooperate tax and the VAT and other taxes that we collect, but when Covid-19 came everything went to zero. So we only depend on the few imported and business that exist,” he added.
