Despite COVID-19 disrupting the socioeconomic conditions in all countries we work in, RDF has continued to achieve significant milestones in the past month. EITI Senegal went live with RDF’s GovIn module, allowing oil and mining companies to submit their declarations online for the 2019 fiscal year. Concurrently, government administrations started using RDF’s Fusion in Senegal, which was implemented to facilitate the cross-institutional integration of data across the extractive industry sector. Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, the Ministry of Mines and Petroleum has been utilizing the royalty module for its mineral contracts and Ghana successfully registered 16 Mining Lease Companies, who are now looking forward to submitting reports online. In this month’s newsletter, we will be featuring RDF’s work in Cameroon with online tax submissions.
Highligths from Cameroon
In Cameroon, with support from German Development Cooperation (GIZ), the second phase of RDF’s Project for the Improvement of Integrated Tax Revenue Management has seen some exciting achievements, such as implementing the FUSION data management system at the Direction Générale des Impôts (DGI). The FUSION data management system was developed to calculate risk levels of taxpayers with an algorithm that cross-references the data within it, serving as the data warehouse. Moreover, RDF has developed a module for submitting online tax returns (Déclaration Statistique et Fiscale). This module saw over 8000 taxpayers submitting their tax returns for the fiscal year 2018. This year, over 9300 tax returns have been submitted with many still in progress.
| Sustainability has always been a focus area for RDF and all our projects put a lot of emphasis on capacity building with our partners. In Cameroon, we therefore, set up a FUSION Helpdesk made up of staff from the IT Division at the DGI. Throughout the duration of the project, the Helpdesk has been involved in managing data upload to FUSION, testing of new features, and supported the development of the online submission module. In February 2020, the FUSION Helpdesk received a full 1-week training by RDF’s software developer, Lidia, in system maintenance and troubleshooting. |
| In March 2020, the Online submission module was once again open for companies to submit their tax returns for the 2019 fiscal year. This time, the FUSION Helpdesk was ready to take on most of the taxpayer support! With the help of the remote support from RDF software developers, the Helpdesk staff were able to apply the lessons learnt during the training to resolve technical issues independently. This greatly reduced the reliance on contacting RDF remote staff, making the submission process much smoother for taxpayers and giving confidence to the IT division to be able to manage the system independently. |
