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‘Only $44m collected from diamond revenue’

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TREASURY yesterday told Parliament that income tax revenue was performing better than diamond revenue, forcing government to continue operating on cash

TREASURY yesterday told Parliament that income tax revenue was performing better than diamond revenue, forcing government to continue operating on a cash budget.

REPORT BY VENERANDA LANGA

Acting Secretary for Finance Judith Madzorera told the Budget, Finance and Investment Promotion Committee, chaired by Goromonzi North MP Paddy Zhanda, that in the 2012 National Budget, government only received $44 million from diamond revenue.

The ministry officials had appeared before the committee to speak about the 2012 budget performance.

She said government had targeted to collect $3,640 billion in revenue during the period under review, but only $3,5 billion was collected resulting in a negative variance of $144 million.

“On non-tax revenue, we targeted collecting $407 million, but we only managed to collect $217 million and this gave us a variance of $190 million, and the major drawback was from diamond revenue where the revised forecast targeted was $239 million and we managed to collect only $44 million,” Madzorera said.

Madzorera said they failed to meet their revenue collection and expenditure targets.

“Our capital expenditure target was to spend $515 million, but we only managed to spend $301 million. The target for recurrent expenditure was $3,2 billion, but our expenditure was $3,1 billion,” she said.

Treasury, Madzorera said, unfortunately depended on monthly inflows which were a collection of between $250 million to $290 million per month and was being chewed by employment costs that averaged $201 million per month.

MPs from the committee said the Ministry of Finance should find ways to pay back money that Zimbabweans lost when the country adopted multiple currencies in 2009.

“The Minister of Finance, Tendai Biti, told Parliament that he was going to allocate money to pay back the Zimbabwean dollars that people lost in 2009. In 2010 a total of US$6 million was provided for in the budget for demonitisation, but to date nothing has been disbursed,” Zhanda said.

Madzorera said the challenge was that government had to give priority to unplanned-for eventualities such as the referendum.

Meanwhile, the Budget and Finance Committee will today begin countrywide public hearings on the Income Tax Bill, which is in the Second Reading Stage in the House of Assembly.