17 Mar 2020

 Botswana Unified Revenue Services (BURS) will introduce a new tax management and revenue collection system called Lekgetho Live with effect from April 1.

This was revealed by BURS’ Mr Klass Mbulawa in Serowe on March 16 during a one-day workshop for business people.

Mr Mbulawa said Lekgetho Live replaced the current integrated tax management system.

He explained that the new system would use Tax Identification Numbers (TINs) across all tax types unlike currently where each tax had its own TIN.

For companies, the Company and Intellectual Property Authority (CIPA) number would be adopted as TIN while  in the case of individual citizens, the TIN would be the letter ‘I’ followed by Omang number.

Non-citizens, NGOs, parastatals, partnerships, trusts, government departments and any legal persons would be issued with system generated TINs, said Mr Mbulawa.

He said VAT registered taxpayers would be issued with new VAT numbers.

All payments would be validated on the BURS database and those rejected would be returned to originating banks, said Mr Mbulawa.

BURS, he said, would only accept manual submission for schedules of less than 10 payees/employees and strictly online submissions for more than 10 payees/employees.

Mr Mbulawa said the system would allocate payment according to rule, tax, interest and penalty.

There was no tax code for late interest and late filing penalty because payment allocation rule would be strictly used.

He said there was no self assessment and assessed tax codes for Corporate Income Tax while other withholding taxes had been given a tax to distinguish them. Ends