NRA’s new commissioner to create mechanism for collection and verification of revenues

JUBA, OCTOBER 5, 2023 (SUDANS POST) – The new head of South Sudan’s National Revenue Authority (NRA), Africano Mande Gedima, has announced plans to create a body that will handle the NRA’s finances for accountability and verification.

Speaking during a reception ceremony held at the NRA’s office in Juba, Mande said that the revenue authority is not being trusted and that a new department is needed to account for, verify, and reconcile collected revenues.

“We need to have a robust department of revenue accounting verification and reconciliation. This thing has to happen. We have to put it in place. The reason is we are being doubted,” he told a crowd at the ceremony.

“On paper we say we have collected 23 billion. When it reaches the ministry of finance, it says it’s 18 billion. Then what happened in the middle here?” he asked.

“When I am asked, I will say let me go and ask, and when I go and ask then that one says he/she is going to ask, and then another month will come the same thing repeats itself, so this we have to address,” he added.

Mande said that the mechanism he plans to establish will ensure that all the collected revenues are accounted for.

“This thing of saying ‘it is in the pipeline’ is not good,” he said, adding that the NRA has entrusted a business entity which is a commercial bank, claiming that this entity any times holds the NRA money for days.

“So, they trade on our money and then they release it later, and we are keeping quiet, we are watching them, maybe we are collaborating with them,” he said of the unnamed commercial bank trading on the public revenues.