March 5, 2021
By Mohamed M. Sesay
Commissioner General of the National Revenue Authority (NRA) Dr. Samuel S. Jibao has yesterday the 3rd of March reassured lawmakers that owing to robust systems and structures put in place, there has been no COVID 19 adverse effect on revenue collection with 2% increase recorded compared to 2020 margin.
Commissioner Jibao made this disclosure during a Public Hearing conducted by Committee Members of the Public Accounts Committee in Parliament.
He indicated that when he took over the Commission he has been putting systems in place which that the COVID 19 shock could not affect.
He disclosed that when he assumed the position as the Commissioner General of NRA, every year they were making one trillion Leones which represents 33% increase of revenue collected in 2018, in contrast to what was collected during the previous administration in 2017.
He added that there was another tremendous growth of one trillion Leones in revenue collection and generation in 2019 “over what I collected in 2018.” He also attributed that to the same brand of innovation introduced at the National Revenue Authority.
Commissioner Jibao however noted that in 2020, the growth of increased bonuses in the revenue generation was slightly above 2% as compared to the collection in 2019 which was a normal year.
He considered the gains made in 2020 which he dubbed as a COVID-19 year was too marginal adding that the Revenue Authority would have been in the region of trillion Leones had it not been for the pandemic.
The Commissioner General used the occasion to speak on remarks of the Deputy Auditor General in terms of the Audit Report specific reference to timber export. He acknowledged the fact that Auditors have the mandate to look at government revenue and expenditure and disagreement might sometimes arise on the computations done by Ministries, Departments and Agencies.
He admitted that there was genuine error but in law and computation as it relates to the timber issue.
Commissioner Jibao further disclosed that the timber issue came up when the 2018 Finance Act was enacted with provision made to charge timber per twenty cubic meters which created a mismatch of the actual figures especially when the container itself can accommodate more than twenty cubic meters of timber.
He noted that the disparity was really a gap and a recipe for serious corruption adding that, because everybody would just claim that the container was not full which would be also very difficult to measure whether it is twenty cubic meters or not.
He further qualified that intention of the players which includes NRA and the Timber Exporter was not really to cheat and there was no need to have even corrected that because by declaring the twenty cubic meters 13.5 cubic meters would not have been reported.
He stated that if you compute eight thousand eight hundred containers that were exported in 2019, there was going to be a revenue loss of almost eight million dollars.
He argued that “this was what the law wanted to correct but in the process of correcting it there were some mistakes along the way, maintaining that the twenty cubic meters, the drafters of the law erroneously removed the “twenty” and put “per cubic meters.” He said the insertion of (s) there shows that they wanted to pluralize something in the sentence.
“Also note that if you say per cubic meters is going to be twenty five hundred what does that mean? It means for every twenty foot container you have to collect eight-three thousand dollars. He questioned: how can you collect eight-three thousand dollars from somebody that will be selling the timber at sixty thousand dollars?
“So that is why I said there was a genuine mistake, because nobody had the intention to steal; and on the contrary, everybody wanted to block those leakages. But now the good news is that the mistake has been corrected by parliament by debating it and it has now been rectified. Everyone along the process takes responsibility including the drafters because when you are drafting you cannot say per means singular and then you say cubic meters… there is an error and even when they were debating it in parliament there was an error because parliament would have picked that one up and even NRA would have picked that up too”, he concluded.