03 Jul 2017

Botswana Unified Revenue Services (BURS) and Competition Authority (CA) have collaborated in order to serve the interests of Batswana better.

Speaking at the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signing ceremony between the two entities recently, director of communications and advocacy at CA, Mr Gideon Nkala said the MoU set into motion a formal and predictable framework that allowed for exchange of information that was mutually beneficial to the parties.

“The signing of this MoU accords with what is happening on the international front, where owing to the emerging developments such as tax base erosion and profit shifting by multinationals, we have seen more countries converging together to sign exchange information frameworks in order to protect their tax base and this points to the need to open up even within the local environment to share information,” he said.

For her part, CA acting chief executive officer, Ms Tebelelo Pule said the signing of the MoU would help CA access credible data from BURS on company figures such as turnover for the purpose of calculating market shares which would enable the Authority to understand the market structure and make informed decisions with respect to the effect of anti-competitive business conducts and mergers and acquisitions as well as any other restrictive business practices.

She further said the information would be used when assessing if the enterprise fell within a threshold of merger filing, assessing whether the organisation was dominant to assess the possibility of abuse of dominance and the competition and the CA could make determination on proposed merger through conditional approval. ENDS