Kigali City Council (KCC) has identified new ways of increasing its revenue collection after working in deficits for more than five years.
The initiative came after a consultant hired by KCC highlighted that the city council was not maximising tax collection, leading to failure in financing some of its developmental projects.

In the last five years, KCC worked under deficit and some of the developmental projects were brought to a standstill. 

The City priority projects that require more funds include infrastructure development, providing shelter for vulnerable groups, security, and electricity installation and cleaning the city.

Bruno Rangira, KCC’s Director of Communication said that some of the strategies in place include a computerised system of tax collection and creating a data base for taxpayers’ activities and amount of tax expected from them.

In a bid to achieve this, a census of tax payers was conducted from March to May this year.

Taxes have been collected manually, causing low and static revenues in the last three years.

Rangira said that with support from GTZ, a software has been developed to automatically calculate the tax.

"We did not have taxpayer database nor a list, but our work will be made easy and increase revenue because we would have a baseline of targeted amount from the database,” he said.

According to the census by KCC, a bigger percentage of tax is collected from property levy, rental income tax and cleaning tax.
Other sources also include introduction of court bailiffs, professional lawyers trained in auction who will be auctioning property from defaulters.

After the census, KCC says that it discovered that 50 percent of the taxpayers were defaulters.

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