GRADED TAX A FINANCIAL DRAIN

  MBABANE – Does the continued collection of graded tax in the Kingdom of Eswatini make financial sense?

This question arises from the fact that this tax contributes an insignificant amount of money to the country’s overall revenue collected by Eswatini Revenue Authority (SRA).

SRA Commissioner General Dumisani Masilela has advised that it would have been a wise decision that graded tax be scrapped in the E21.83 billion 2019/20 budget presented by Minister of Finance Neal Rijkenberg in Parliament on February 27, 2019.
The basis of Masilela’s assertion to the effect that cancellation of graded tax collection would be an ideal move was in response to a question posed during an editors’ breakfast meeting convened at Royal Villas last Friday.

Masilela disclosed that efficient graded tax collection requires more resources than what it actually contributes to the tax pool. The CG revealed that from April 2018 to February 2019, they had successfully collected E1 164 969 as graded taxes. An individual within the working class is obligated to pay E18 in terms of the Graded Tax Act of 1968.

For the same period (April 2018 to February 2019), the SRA collected E8.259 billion as taxes. Out of this total amount, which has been pumped into the SRA by taxpayers in different categories, graded tax did not make up for even one per cent.
In fact, graded tax only contributed 0.014 per cent.

Resources

“Between 80 to 90 per cent of the traffic which visits SRA service centres countrywide pertains to graded tax. This effectively means more resources get allocated to graded tax collection instead of focusing on making tax collection more efficiently across the board,” Masilela explained.

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