About the Writer

D E Wasake (FCCA) is a principal at Inachee.com a thought leadership firm in Uganda.

I have collected this information from my experience with clients in Uganda, review of tax laws in Uganda as well as from insights from an associate of ours, an experienced officer currently working with Uganda Revenue Authority (URA).

How can you avoid or reduce tax payment? This is the objective of this article. It provides tips to reduce your tax exposure including through tax avoidance, which is not illegal and therefore acceptable by URA provided you have documentation to support your basis.

On the other hand we do not advocate tax evasion. We are an ethical firm which encourages regulatory compliance. Besides tax evasion is punishable in addition to stringent penalties.

General

1.       Get a Tax Identification Number (TIN) NOW. It is FREE and should be provided for all your imports or tax related items. It saves you costs. As an example, there is no tax charged on import of laptops and computers but if you provide no TIN then you will be charged Withholding Tax (WHT). You don’t only pay WHT if you are registered for corporate tax, a TIN will just help you track your taxes paid/payable by notification on your email.

 

When you have a TIN then you can recover all WHT during submission of tax returns. You can only recover WHT if you have evidence that you have been double taxed, for example if you bought a car using a salary loan, because  salary is taxed, then you can claim for WHT which is a % of the value of the item.


To read the rest of the article, click here