By Maimuma Sey-Jawo
The Gambia Revenue Authority has dismissed a claim saying the GRA is collecting daily duty fees from petty traders around the country as false and unfounded.
The authority’s dismissal comes after petty traders claimed that GRA collects revenue duties from them on daily basis at various markets.
However, speaking to The Voice Newspaper, Yankuba Darboe, Commissioner General for GRA said “many don’t understand the role of GRA and that of the Municipalities and Area Councils. Because some of the market areas GRA staff are not even there, it is the municipalities or Area councils, that do go around markets collecting rates and taxes from the markets for their municipality and council.”
But he quickly emphasized that people are mixing GRA staff with officers from the Municipal and Area Councils “but they are completely different.”
“Our system of collection and the council is completely different as most of those women that are complaining are referring to the municipality but not GRA because our collection is mostly base on system in term of sitting at the office trying to do assessment base on files and people comes and pay and if we have doubt on what someone pay, we have what we called tax audit, by selecting businesses and audit them to verify what they are paying,” he explained.
The Commissioner General further made it cleared that GRA is only responsible of collecting Revenue for Government and save it at the Central Bank of The Gambia but the expenditure of the collected revenue is determine by Government, “we are account for every single butut that we collect from businesses.”
He then assured that GRA will keep using the media as a tool to enlighten the general public more on the role of GRA and that of the municipalities and Areas Councils across the country.