Damascus-SANA
The Director General of the General Authority for Taxes and Fees, Munther Wannous, explained that the authority is currently working on the completion of projects to automate the tax number and the single account for the taxpayer, and the preparation of the electronic central database for taxpayers and the electronic financial clearance service in the Damascus Countryside Finance Directorate, indicating that all these projects will see the light before the end of this year.
In an interview with SANA, Wannous revealed that once the full automation of the financial disclosure is completed, the taxpayers will be able to write to the citizen service center and submit a request for clearance via e-mail, so that the center will send it to the authority, which in turn submits the electronic clearance and sends it to the taxpayer either via e-mail or on paper.
After its success since mid-2020 by automating the process of providing the electronic financial clearance service in the Damascus finance department, the authority is currently working, according to Lunos, to download databases in the Damascus countryside finance so that this service will be ready before the end of this year, with work to activate it in the affiliated directorates in the rest of the governorates.
Wannous pointed to the great importance of establishing a central electronic database that includes all information about taxpayers, their tax lives, activities and changes, their places of work and business numbers, and linking this base to the electronic payment system, revealing the acceleration of work to complete the electronic stamp system project instead of the traditional one, which will be implemented before the end of the year to simplify services for taxpayers.
With regard to the launch of the electronic payment services for the lump-sum income taxes and real estate revenues, Wannous indicated that the authority is in the final testing phase on these two services, which took longer to complete due to the advanced structure related to them and the need to harmonize between financial investigations and the method of electronic payment collection.
He pointed to the success of automating the real estate sales program, which connects all governorates, which contributed to the knowledge of the amount and type of sales and the places of bottlenecks in the provision of services to address them, stressing the continuation of work on developing this program and ensuring permanent communication through optical fiber technology, VPN technology and Data Sim” in order to meet the increasing demand for services by users.
Wannous pointed out that automation projects are implemented with local expertise and benefit from international expertise, and will contribute to “reducing the burden of movement on the shoulders of citizens and saving time, money and the huge amount of paperwork.”
Wannous stated that the comprehensive automation of tax work and the issue of building electronic databases require great effort and long-term integrated projects, and therefore automation cannot be implemented within medium or short-term projects because the automated tax administration depends mainly on an automated database management process in which information is intersecting and integrated in a way that can Get quick and accurate access to tax data for each taxpayer.
The General Authority for Taxes and Fees, in accordance with the law of its creation, enjoys legal personality and financial and administrative independence. It is linked to the Minister of Finance and aims to propose and implement tax policy in light of the state’s general financial and economic policy to serve the effective contribution to the implementation of economic and social development plans.
Waseem Al-Adawi and Malik Abdo
