Top brass of the Gambia Revenue Authority on Wednesday 18th January briefed the media on their recent mission in Uganda.
The briefing also witnessed a goodwill message by the directors to the staff of GRA for achieving the annual revenue target for 2022.
In his briefing statement Commissioner General Yankuba Darboe told journalists that the authority is committed to ensuring that all its systems are digitalised to avoid leakages and ensure more transparency.
Commissioner Darboe who returned from a study trip to Uganda said the authority went to the Eastern African country to make study on the roads of fuel importation to ensure that it has a proper monitoring system in the area.
He commended the taxpayers for been cooperative and tax compliance and urged those who are still reluctant to pay taxes to comply in 2023 for the interest of the country.
The respected experienced customs officer said despite all the global economic challenges the authority was able to collect over D12.7 billion, while commending his staff for their understanding and the government for maintaining peace and stability in the country.
“We also urged all Gambians to remain vigilant and safeguard the country’s peace and stability,” he said.
Commissioner General Darboe added: “Ecowas has supported us with another system called Sigma, a software interface with the Asycuda World and it’s mainly to monitor the transit of goods within the sub region.
They have already done all the installations and we are just waiting for Senegal to do theirs for us to commence the service. We also have a single window that we are going to use for all our importation processes. The GRA, GPA, Shipping Agents and all the stakeholders in the importation landscape. We are doing all this because we want to digitalise all our operations to ensure that we have fewer human interventions and ensure more effective revenue mobilisation.
Now that we have a lot of factories in the Gambia who pay excise tax based on their production but it ordinarily is very difficult for us to get the right statistics from them. Now, this company that we are trying to work with will bring its equipment and fix them in the factories to ensure that every bottle or bag that is produced is marked and sent to a server that is handle by the GRA and at the end of the day we will use that data to do our taxing to ensure the factories pay correct taxes.”