Fikremariam Tesfaye
11 February 2008
Addis Abeba — The government will not just coordinate the activities of the Ethiopian customs, Inland Revenue authorities and the National Lottery Administration; it will merge them all, the Federal Ministry of Revenues announced on Thursday.
The three government bodies, Particularly the Customs Authority and the Inland Revenue authorities have in the past been criticized by many for their inefficient services and corrupt staff.
The government says it will now make them operate altogether and employ the Business Process Reengineering (BPR)- is a management approach aiming at improvements by means of elevating efficiency and effectiveness of the process that exists within and across the organization.
The announcement was made at a presentation on the results of a research undertaken on PBR under the restructuring program.
Tax Improvement Secretariat Director Nebiyu Samuel, who led the team of researchers on the BPR project, said the measure taken by the government was a step forward to transform the country's revenue collection system.
"The restructuring indicates the commitment of the government to put its house in order," he observed.
The research included 122 professionals from different organizations.
According to the researcher, a pilot implementation on Federal Inland Revenue Authority (FIRA) and Airport custom showed remarkable results both in the level of efficiency and the volume of tax collected.
He said the research revealed the fact that previous customer handling was unfavourable, time wasting and full of bureaucracy that only helped create a wide gap between one of the government's most important public service outlets and the business community.
Nebiyu added that a code of conduct and a working manual will be designed and distributed to staff.
Be the first to Write a Comment!
Copyright © 2008 The Daily Monitor. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections — or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.
