Revenue Authority blames senior government officials for delaying reforms
The South Sudan National Revenue Authority (NRA) effort to reform in order to increase non-oil revenue collection is currently being sabotaged by some of it’s top officials.
This was revealed Monday by Patrick Mugoya, the NRA Commissioner General at Dembesh Hotel in Juba during the opening of the symposium discussing ways of improving performance of NRA staff.
“Making NRA fully operational is never an easy nor a straightforward mission to say the least, at this critical moment when we are about to fully operationalize the NRA we are increasingly witnessing desperate, blatant and unprofessional acts of defiance from some of the top echelons in the NRA hierarchy in both overt and covert fashion,” Mugoya said.
Despite this Mugoya noted that NRA has increased revenue collection from 47.3 billion pounds for 2020-2021 to 58.3 billion pounds in 2021/2022 financial year.
“Despite the challenges, our promise as NRA management to the public was to make the authority fully operational while at the same time introducing tactical measures to increase non-oil revenue in a big way,” he said.
Angelo Deng Rehan, the Undersecretary for Planning in the National Ministry Finance, hailed NRA for the latest milestone in improving non-oil revenue collection.
“What we need to know as South Sudanese is that our only hope is NRA because oil is a depletable thing, we do not even know how long the oil is going to support this country. I believe that this (non-oil revenue) is the only sector that will help this country,” Rehan said.
