Ethiopia says it will tighten up its tax monitoring and collection systems to ensure that tax due from trading activities is collected.

The authorities told local media that they are also investigating and plan to break up what they describe as illegal trading networks.

Computerisation

Ethiopia is in the process of computerising a hitherto manual system for collecting tax from traders.

The manual system has been prone to abuse by corrupt tax officials who take bribes to submit false declarations or who allow illegal trading networks to exist.

Improvements

Since the authorities introduced computerised revenue collection systems more tax has been collected.

The amount of tax collected from Addis Ababa City Administration for example reached 21 billion birr (ETB21 billion – US$950 million) in the financial year ending June 2016, around ETB4 billion more than it collected in the previous year.

Illegal networks

But according to officials, there is plenty more scope for collecting tax that traders have for years been able to avoid.

As well as seeking out and dismissing corrupt tax officials, the authorities say they are edging closer towards closing down several illegal trading networks.