Inland Revenue launches e-declaration for real estate transactions

The Inland Revenue Service of the Cameroonian Ministry of Finance has just announced that it would launch, starting from June 1 2016, in the cities of Douala and Yaoundé, the electronic tax declaration for real estate transactions.

This reform, the Inland Revenue Director Modeste Mopa Fatoing stressed, "follows the recent recommendations of the Cameroon Business Forum (CBF)" and "will help to simplify procedures for the taxpayers and to secure the revenues of the State".

For several months now, in addition to an administrative restructuring which among other things led to the creation of the Small Enterprises Tax Centre, the Cameroonian Inland Revenue Service has undertaken several reforms to digitise procedures, in order to facilitate processes for taxpayers, and foremost secure tax revenues. Thus came abou the introduction of mobile payment, experimented at first on the land tax, and which is about to be extended to other tax services.

These reforms immediately generated concrete results, since they not only led to an increase in the tax base through a larger taxpayer database, but also to an increase in revenues. Indeed, over a period of 18 months, the tax database moved from 2,500 to 96,791 taxpayers. All of which helped the Inland Revenue Services to meet their 2015 revenue targets at 110%.