“Are the revenue authorities listening?”

When we asked East Africa’s business leaders in PricewaterhouseCoopers East Africa’s Most Respected Companies Survey 2005 what were the most significant challenges that they had to deal with in order to make their businesses successful, we were not surprised that tax administration ranked highly. Yet this is not the first time this has been identified as a challenge by the region’s business leaders – and similarly, this is not the first time that the tax authorities would have heard about this view from the private sector.

Are the revenue authorities listening? Like a lot of taxation questions, this can have more than one answer. In this case, both Yes and No, depending on who you talk to, and in what context.