Letter to URA: You’re kicking us out of business by over taxing imported goods

I humbly write to your Uganda Revenue Authority Office on the point of excessive taxes on the goods imported to the country. Every year I have been importing goods from USA to Uganda and

this happens four times in a year but due to the high taxes I chose to reduce to zero importing.

It seems URA is working so hard to kick importers out of business with these
unreasonable and unnecessary taxation charges.

Being a businessman, I know so many other business people who used to import commodities from the USA to Uganda but most of them gave up due to the unnecessary high taxes
imposed on the goods.

The moment a container reaches here in Uganda,the verification process is very
stressful and painful since the persons from the URA office who are in charge of
the verification process are like small gods in their offices and they do things unprofessionally.

The URA officials seeing the goods being imported for the first time into the country, they assume automatically that they are of high value thus imposing high taxes even without assessing or looking at the importation papers. They always want to clear our goods at their mercy.

The verification process is very painful since goods are verified in a disorganized way and and when you take long to pay the clearance fees, goods which are mishandled end up being damaged. Therefore one ends up paying taxes for goods that are not of value and this is the result of recklessness by some URA officials.

No wonder no one loves to do business in such an environment which I believe as a concerned citizen that Uganda as a country is losing out economically.

URA should style up to make business easier for the importers since this process helps to create jobs for so many people other than imposing abnormal taxes.

Yours faithfully;

By Lwanga Ian Micheal

Lwanga921@gmail.com