Tax redo perks up business optimism

THE tax reforms initiated by the Zimbabwe Revenue Authority (Zimra) will provide a much-needed fillip to both business and the fiscus, experts say.
This comes as Zimra is developing a new Tax and Revenue Management System (TaRMS) to address significant shortcomings under the current system and to further improve the country’s ease of doing business climate.
Economic analyst Victor Bhoroma is among the experts who told The Financial Gazette — the country’s number one business publication — this week that the new tax regime would boost the government’s revenue collection efforts as well as commerce and industry.
“Tax simplification, ease of payment, clarity and efficiency are all critical pieces to tax remittance in the economy. Tax payment is also one of the key components used by the World Bank to measure a country’s ease of doing business. So Zimra has a key role in ensuring that citizens and businesses that pay tax do it with utmost ease. Without this, all taxpayers go informal and tax compliance continues to decline,” he said.
“Zimra achieves its target in every quarter largely because inflation erodes the value of the actual target. In real terms, tax collection as a percentage of GDP fell sharply from 2019 to 2021, but picked up in the last two years.