Cameroon’s Director General of Taxes says that measures taken by Government to contain Covid 19 come at a huge cost. Modeste Mopa Fatoing who spoke to the national daily Cameroon Tribune further revealed that, these different measures will undoubtedly do a lot of good for Cameroonian companies impacted since the start of the crisis.
“You should know that measures to suspend tax audits and forced collection also have a cost. Overall, for the time being, all of the fiscal support measures decided by the authorities are estimated at 114 billion FCFA, or 92 billion FCFA for internal revenue and 22 billion FCFA for customs revenue. This tax cost, as you can guess, represents only a portion of the overall cost incurred by the authorities in the response to the serious COVID-19 pandemic, ” the Taxation boss said.
On the question of knowing whether the envelope of 25 billion FCFA of the President of the Republic for the clearance of VAT credits, awaiting reimbursement, is sufficient to settle this State debt, Modeste Mopa Fatoing replies: I think it is important to point out at the outset that the authorities have done a lot of work in recent years to improve our system for reimbursing VAT credits.
As such, we can mention the sequestration account mechanism which allows automatic allocation every month, 6 billion FCFA to operations to repay VAT credits; processing requests according to a risk-based approach, making spontaneous reimbursement possible and without prior control for companies presenting no risk, controls being carried out a posteriori; and especially the dematerialization of all the procedure for requesting reimbursement of VAT credits already implemented at the level of the Direction of Large Enterprises.
The only remaining difficulty so far was that related to the stock of credits accumulated before the reforms I have just mentioned; stock evaluated to date at around 25 billion FCFA. Hence the allocation of this special envelope of equal amount which will make it possible to completely absorb this stock awaiting reimbursement. I must also specify, to make it clear enough, that this special envelope comes on top of that initially provisioned for 72 billion FCFA in the state budget for the 2020 financial year,” he explained.
