Improving business climate: MINFI officials begin updating business operators in D’la today.

According to the Minister of Finance, Louis Paul Motaze, given the economy’s vulnerability to shocks and its dependence on external financing, it has become imperative to find ways to step up internally generated revenue for use by the government.

Added to this, is the need to strengthen and secure the tax system to ensure good tax governance so that resources are also used more efficiently. Thus, the Cameroon tax administration has undertaken the dematerialisation of its revenue collection procedures.

This ambition gave birth to the Support Programme for the Modernisation of Public Finances III, PAMFIP III. This was masterminded and designed by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, BMZ.

The programme that was launched in 2020 is expected to end by December this year. As a lower-middle-income country, with Gross Domestic Product, GDP of 1,349 Euros as at 2019, Cameroon faces significant obstacles to its development, officials say.

This explains the National Development Strategy, SND30, of government which is anchored on four pillars: Structural transformation to improve economic planning; Developing human capital, particularly in social occupations; Promoting employment and integrating young people into the economy; Governance, decentralisation and strategic management of the State.

To achieve these goals, government, officials told reporters Monday, has been reforming public finances.

Some of these measures include; introducing results-based budget management and making the planning, programming, budgeting and evaluating of processes more coherent.

According to the International Monetary Fund, IMF, internally generated revenues or tax revenues in Cameroon are low. It represented 17.1 per cent of the GDP as of now and only 110,000 of the approximately 25.9 million inhabitants of the country pay taxes regularly.

Efficient collection of taxes and other revenues could increase this amount significantly, the IMF insists. Thus, the need for more reforms in tax and revenue administration.

The objective being to put in place development-oriented budget management; improved revenue management and beefing up cooperation in relations between central and decentralized local collectivities.

The goal is to make the latter better placed to attain critical development objectives at the grassroots, through more efficient management of available resources.

Since 2020, the German project has been supporting the Cameroon tax and revenue administration to carry out transparent and data-based audits.

Further digitalisation of processes through the FUSION IT tool is making the processes more transparent, increasing internally generated revenues and improving the business climate.

In Cameroon, revenue from taxes represents on average 17% of the national budget.  

However, since the circular N° 00000242/C/MINFI of 30th December 2020 of the Minister of Finance, receipts are now issued electronically, and payments are made either by telepayment, or at the counters of credit institutions when cash is involved, or by bank transfer, or by the Mobile Tax system.

Companies in the portfolio of the Large Business Directorate, DGE, are required to make their payments exclusively by bank or electronic means.