Govt urged to cut spending

By SHIRLEY MAULUDU
THE spending behaviour of Government entities should be controlled given these unprecedented hard times, a senior state agency head says.
Internal Revenue Commission (IRC) commissioner-general Sam Koim told The National yesterday that State entities needed to look at cost cutting measures in their respective offices.
“Government entities and people should not continue their licentious behaviour that they have when they have plentiful,” he said.
“Cost cutting measures should be explored.”
Koim added that the Covid-19 had also exposed weaknesses and inefficiencies in Government organisations.
“In response, many of them are remobilising their resources and approaches to make productive investments and improve efficiency in the delivery of their core services. We should also explore those.
“As an example, during the lockdown period, IRC maintained a skeleton staff but the revenue collection were still on target for each week.
“This shows that we can improve our performance if we efficiently utilise all our staff.
“We are in the middle of the year but, in terms of our revenue collections, we are trending below seven per cent.
“The situation could be worse if we hadn’t taken some measures to stop revenue leakage and increased collections.
“We are continuing to initiate some of those projects.
“There is a huge tax gap – distance between what we are collecting at the moment and what we are supposed to collect.
“With the activities we are initiating, I am confident that we will be able to mitigate the impact of the Covid-19 on collections.”