By Ntombi Mhlongo
The Eswatini Revenue Service (ERS) has revealed that it has collected about E1.25 billion in revenue in the past year, the highest growth ever recorded.
This was announced by the ERS Commissioner General (CG) Brightwell Nkambule during a breakfast meeting with the media at the Hilton Garden Inn.
The collected revenue reflects an increase of 11.6 per cent. Making his presentation, Nkambule states that there has been a significant improvement in voluntary compliance. He said in the previous year, voluntary compliance increased by two per cent.
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This is concerning taxpayers who filed their returns and paid on time.
“We are happy with the response we received from our clients. We want to build trust between ourselves and our clients,” he said.
Elaborating, the Commissioner General said they also witnessed an improvement in their net promotion rating.
“After every interaction with clients, we invite them to rate us out of 10. If the scale is below five, it is not a positive score. So the response we received was overwhelming,” he said.
Meanwhile, the CG revealed that the parastatal will next month host a session where it will engage with its stakeholders. Known as the Tax Appreciation Day, the event is scheduled for June 30. More details will be revealed in due course.
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Last year, the ERS did state that it would up its game in terms of tax collection. This, it said, is in line with their Strategic Theme of ‘Digitalized and data-driven with our Partners’ which made them embark on a journey to work with different entities to collate data to ensure that there is compliance.
It happened at a time when the company had discovered that tax arrears in Eswatini had increased by 29 per cent to E9.369 billion from E7.262 billion in 2020/21.
The contributing factors included the Covid-19 pandemic, coupled with other economic and social disturbances which weighed on current and future growth prospects and continued to threaten the government’s ability to maintain its tax revenue mobilisation goals.