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Zimra moves on fiscal gadgets shortage

Business
The Zimbabwe Revenue Authority (Zimra) has approached the Ministry of Finance for funding as it moves to avert fiscal gadgets shortage.

The Zimbabwe Revenue Authority (Zimra) has approached the Ministry of Finance for funding as it moves to avert fiscal gadgets shortage.

BY FIDELITY MHLANGA

Zimra board chairperson Willia Bonyongwe
Zimra board chairperson Willia Bonyongwe

Zimra board chairperson Willia Bonyongwe said the move came at a time approved gadgets suppliers were failing to meet the growing demand, as companies push to comply with fiscalisation.

“It’s crisis management. We had an industry which was supposed to supply the market. They were overwhelmed. They didn’t actually project the demand which they were expected to cope with because everybody now wants to comply with fiscalisation since we have tied up the clearance certificate to that. We have the supply bottleneck in terms of fiscal gadgets which the authority is coming in to deal with,” Bonyongwe said last week.

She said old fiscal gadgets had functional and compatibility problems which forced clients to abandon them.

“We also had gadgets under the invoice management system. Those gadgets had two problems; one of them was they had no stock control function. So, most clients abandoned them. They also didn’t have Wifi compatibility, so the market shunned them. So we do have a gadget problem. But what we have done as a board is that we went to ask the Ministry of Finance to allocate us some funds so we can buy the gadgets. I think in the next week (this week) or so we are going to receive the first batch of those gadgets which are going to be from Zimra,” Bonyongwe said.

The minister of Finance and Economic Development made regulations in terms of Section 78 of the Value Added Tax Act which require operators to record all transactions using fiscalised devices. These regulations are cited as the Value-Added Tax (Fiscalised Recording of Taxable Transactions) Regulations, 2010 and came into effect on July 1, 2010.

These regulations are being amended to provide for the fiscalisation of Categories A, B, and D VAT registered operators.

Fiscalised gadgets are electronic devices which contain a fiscal memory. These are fiscalised electronic registers — also referred to as electronic tax registers, fiscalised printers and electronic signature devices.

The fiscal memory is permanently built into a fiscalised device to store tax information at the time of the sale.

Although measures are in place to mitigate the cost of acquiring the devices through a duty rebate on the importation of approved fiscalised devices by approved suppliers, the gadgets were being sold to local companies at an exorbitant price.

However, Bonyongwe said Zimra would make sure the gadgets are affordable, adding that there were pilot runs to find lasting solutions towards connecting companies and the authority without the need for fiscalised gadgets.

“The price is much lower because part of the outcry was that they were expensive, but as a board we are moving with technology to find a solution which is cheaper to both the client and the authority, which is a virtual system. I think they are doing some pilot runs that don’t need a gadget, but you just connect,” she said.

Bonyongwe said the authority was in the process of shortlisting suppliers with the capacity to supply gadgets in bulk.

“We have no intention of destroying that industry, but we have actually also opened up so that we have big companies who can order $2 million or $3 million worth of gadgets because the demand will be there,” she said.