2% Tax Raised Almost $100 million In January Not $50 million

Nothing is as universally loathed by people as Mthuli Ncube’s 2% tax. Dubbed the Electronic Transactions Tax, it was introduced last year where the government would levy 2% tax on all electronic transactions. Over the following months, the tax was fine-tuned to exclude a number of transactions including important wallet to bank transactions which people need to transfer money from their bank accounts to their Ecocash wallets.

Given that cash problems still, persist to this day the government was always going to raise significant amounts of revenue via this tax. This has been proven to be true over the past number of months.

• In November of 2018 the government raised RTG$ 52.5 million
• In December RTG$103.8 was raised

This means that a total of RTGS$166.2 was raised in 2018 alone. Initial reports claimed that the government raised RTGS$50 million. January disease or not this seemed a rather low figure compared with January. The Accountant-General, Daniel Muchemwa was quoted in February by the Chronicle saying:

I am glad to say that this January we managed to collect $50 million from two percent tax. We will spend that money on PSIP projects and not on salaries. I would like to applaud Government for such efforts, which have seen the raising of the money which will be channelled towards funding PSIP projects.

Well according to the Mthuli Ncube’s report the government managed to raise RTGS $98.5 million in January which is a slight but understandable drop from the December revenue which was no doubt buoyed by increased spending during the holiday season.

The government expects to raise about $600 million in 2019.