By David Muwanga

THE Uganda Revenue Authority (URA) has started a campaign to crackdown on rental income tax defaulters.

Rental income tax is payable by all landlords including private owners who rent out their houses. It is based on payment of 20% of the 80% of the rental income collected.

“If you stay in your own house and not renting it out, you do not pay any tax. Otherwise, we consider sh130,000 as the threshold, but above it you pay a tax,” Frank Katusiime, the URA head of planning told The New Vision.

He said since about mid-May, sh1b has been collected in Kampala district alone. Tax on rent has been one of hardest taxes for URA to collect.

He was one of the discussants at the National Gender Budget Dialogue organised by the Forum for Women in Democracy held at Hotel Equatoria last week.

“We are targeting those people in both Kampala and other urban areas who own and rent out their premises and have been defaulting payment of the tax,” Katusime said.

“However we have not carried out a survey on how much we expect to collect from the whole exercise that began one and half months ago,”

“We have not penetrated much in the rural-urban centres as the section is still constrained by lack of vehicles, there are only two vehicles to be used throughout the country,”.

He said that the situation is worsened by the few regional and district URA offices who are however helping in the exercise,” he said.

URA is offering cash rewards for people who report defaulters.

“URA encourages people to pay taxes on voluntary basis, but anybody who reports a defaulter gets ten percent of what we collect,” he said.