Zambia Revenue Authority Director General Kingsley Chanda says the authority has exceeded its revenue collection target by K140 million in the first quarter.

Speaking when he addressed the press in Livingstone yesterday on the sidelines of an Indaba on “Repositioning Zambian Capital Markets as an Enabler to Sustainable Economic Development”, Chanda said ZRA was performing very well so far.

“In terms of revenue performance, as a result of our enforcement activities, and indeed the measures that were announced by the Minister during the 2017 budget, our revenue performance has been very good. We have consistently met the target and overall in the first quarter, I wish to report that we were K140 million above target. Our target for the quarter was K8, 233 billion and we collected K8, 373 billion which gave us a surplus of K140 million. So this is as a result of the measures announced in the 2017 budget which included among other things the collection of VAT at source, introduction of surtax on some commodities and other measures that were announced by the Minister in parliament. But apart from that, we have also supplemented that with very vigorous enforcement strategy,” Chanda said.

Chanda also announced that ZRA had developed a new approach of seizing and forfeiting both goods and vessels used for smuggling.

“Our new approach as announced in the press will be to seize and forfeit both the goods and the vessels that are used for smuggling. In the past we used to give an option of filing, sometimes we used to sue the perpetrators but in our new approach, we will just be seizing the goods and the vessels,” said Chanda.
And speaking at the same briefing, Finance Minister Felix Mutati encouraged ZRA to collect more revenue saying government needed the money to clear some arrears.

“This is commendable, but we want to urge the commissioner general and the team that we need more revenue because of the challenges that we have got to undertake, in particular capital development to deal with the arrears that are still giving us headache. Arrears that still remain in excess of K10 billion. We have a tremendous task to raise revenue and that is why we have said this year, that we can’t walk on the journey alone, we need the corporation of cooperating partners and others,” said Mutati.