URA to deploy drones on smugglers at border points

Taxman URA intends to invest in surveillance drones at porous border points in response to a smuggler who faked death to evade URA enforcement officers in Elegu.

The Uganda Revenue Authority (URA) will not leave even a rat squeeze through to evade taxes and the latest after the hullabaloo over EFRIS is the deployment of surveillance drones at porous border points to curb tax evasion and create a levelled marketplace.

This comes after the URA enforcement operation intercepted a middle-aged man smuggling jerrycans of cooking oil and assorted food items at Alinyapi in Elegu point point with South Sudan.

Upon being intercepted, the man threw himself to the ground and pretended to be dead.

With great concern, the enforcement team immediately conveyed the “purported dead body” on a three-wheeler motorcycle commonly known as Tuk-tuk to Alinyapi HCII where the medical workers declared him alive and kicking.

In response to the act, the URA spokesman Ibrahim Bbosa asked traders to follow procedures designed to facilitate trade.

"URA currently has more than 27 cargo scanners as part of non-intrusive screening at official border crossings, one step towards developing anti-smuggling technology," Bbosa said.

According to information from URA, the river’s water levels have risen recently, and the enforcement team abandoned monitoring the route only to return to a group of young men completely stripped as they sailed through with jerrycans of cooking oil, rice, soap, and sugar, among other items.

The youth use ropes that they tie across and pull jerrycans and other items that are well covered to avoid penetration by water.

This operation recovered eight motorcycles used in the conveyance of smuggled goods, 1,340 litres of Dynas cooking oil, 1,000 litres of petrol, 500 pieces of soap, 125kg of brown sugar, and 600 packets of spaghetti.

While traders develop new comic antics in dodging taxes and smuggling, URA has also heightened intelligence to counter the vice.

Additionally, URA plans to invest in surveillance drones at porous border points to further curb such vices and create a levelled marketplace for Ugandans.

According to data from URA, During the period of July to March of the FY 2021/22 over Shs70.04 billion was recovered from 5,748 seizures ranging from textiles, contraband cosmetics, rice, and fuel among others.

The deployment of various intelligence measures like informers deterred smugglers who sneak into the country through inconspicuous concealment ways such as us hidden compartments in passenger cars and cross-border buses, hiding goods under cement or coffee husks, to mention but a few.

Prior to her replacement, the former Commissioner-General URA Doris Akol revealed that government loses at least $270,000 (about Shs985 million) per day to smuggling in unpaid taxes and that some officials in the tax body were complicit in turning a blind eye to the vice.

In a phone interview Abel Kagumire, the commissioner for customs at URA, told this publication that he did not have current statistics on how much government is losing to smuggling.

"I don’t have information now and I don’t want to predict, I actually need some time to come up with the right figure,’’ Kagumire said.

The Annual Performance Report of 2018 jointly authored by ActionAid and Civil Society Budget Advocacy Group (CSBAG) indicate that More than $3,240,000 which is Shs11.8 billion flows out of Uganda annually as smuggling is aided by some of the corrupt border officials fuelling this phenomenon - according to Uganda’s loss to Illicit Financial Flows.