By William Madouk
National Revenue Authority asked for the speedy construction of a tax administration institute to build staff capacity to increase non-oil revenue collection in the country.
Commissioner-General of the National Revenue Authority, Athian Ding Athian made the appeal during an inspection visit to South Sudan Tax Administration Institute.
The building was formerly known as the Directorate of Taxation under the National Ministry of Finance.
The Commissioner General said the building will offer space for training of tax officers.
According to him, the institute would improve the capacity of national revenue authority staff, and reduce the cost of spending much resources abroad.
“The Commissioner General of the National Revenue Authority (NRA) Authority expresses his full support to all the staff wherever they are deployed,” a statement seen by this outlet partly reads.
He also encourages all staff to collect more non-oil revenues to meet the government target, which was allocated to the national revenue authority as their contribution to the national budget.
Mr. Athian also inspected the new building next to the one of the NRA, where some of the executive staff will be accommodated.
The new office block is expected to make operations of the NRA easier and bring the leadership of the institution closer to one another.
During his official installation last month, Athian highlighted his plans at the summit of the revenue agency, emphasizing that mega-marginal increase is possible.
Athian pledged that NRA shall embark on rolling out an elaborate tax base expansion programme aimed at yielding up to SSP 40 billion per month by the end of the coming financial year.
He said National Revenue Authority plans to empower the domestic tax division to identify more taxpayers through access to key databases in both the private and public sectors.
According to a statement from the former Commissioner General of the NRA, Dr. Patrick Mugoya, during FY 2020/21 the organization collected SSP 3.9 billion as monthly income.
Meanwhile, it later improved to SSP 6.7 billion in FY 2021/22, and now SSP 16 billion in FY 2022/23 a monthly average collection.