Chaos at ZIMRA

PHILLIMON MHLANGA

The Zimbabwe Revenue Authority (ZIMRA) has been plunged into chaos after its electronic filing system became dysfunctional, Business Times can report.

The latest development has forced thousands of business clients to invade ZIMRA offices, causing a lot of havoc.

Business leaders who spoke at the KPMG International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) and Business meeting held in the capital last week said it was a nightmare submitting returns or even checking the status of their accounts after ZIMRA’s e-filing system collapsed several months ago.

This, they said, has inconvenienced them as they are now forced to submit their returns via e-mail or physically visiting ZIMRA offices.

However, the captains of industry said their returns submitted via e-mails or dropped physically at ZIMRA offices were not being captured and will only discover it when they apply for tax clearance.

Apparently, ZIMRA would classify such companies as tax dodgers.

Consequently, some companies would have their accounts raided through garnishee orders.

Apart from that, after failing to get online tax clearances the companies are incurring losses because 10% will be deducted from their invoices for lack of current tax clearance certificate.

ZIMRA’s head of technical services, Mathias Chinanayi, confirmed the problem adding that a new system will be rolled out in June next year.

“We have acute challenges with our  e-filing platform,” Chinanayi said.

He added:  “We have a new system which will be rolled out next year. We hope we can have e-filing system of returns again.”

Chinanayi said ZIMRA was working flatout to deal with the problem manually.

He said a dedicated team under the administration department was now in place to deal with the capturing of the returns.

“We have now employed  a manager  in that department to ensure that these are captured as they are supposed to be.

So, we will double check if they are still having such a problem,” Chinanayi said.

The  e-filing system  was introduced in 2015 as part of plans to  ease tax compliance by enabling  one  to register with ZIMRA and submit returns  online from the comfort of their offices and homes.

This system was supposed to make  tax compliance  easy.

However, the opposite is happening as  businesses struggle  to renew their tax clearances which expire at the end of each year.

A tax clearance certificate is one of the most critical documents to have, as most businesses will not pay invoices from suppliers without a current document.

Consequently, everyone scrambles to get their tax clearance certificates every new year meaning there is always congestion at ZIMRA offices.