HARARE: The Zimbabwe Revenue Authority (Zimra) has impounded hundreds of vehicles in a blitz to flush out cars that have been smuggled into the country.
The blitz followed an announcement by Zimra commissioner-general Gershem Pasi that many vehicles were being corruptly brought into the country, evading tax in the process.
Zimra board secretary and director legal and corporate services, Florence Jambwa told Standardbusiness last week that many vehicles had been impounded and offenders penalised.
“Several motor vehicles were and are still being impounded and the offenders are penalised in accordance with the laws of the land. I am, however, unable to give you statistics as this is an ongoing exercise,” she said.
Jambwa said the underhand dealings meant that the smuggled vehicles did not pass through the system and therefore it was difficult to calculate how much revenue had been lost through these malpractices.
She, however, said Zimra had since put in place measures to curb smuggling, which included roadblocks, border patrols, physical examinations, goods scanning and post clearance checks audits, among other initiatives.
According to Zimra, 24 967 private vehicles had been imported into the country in the period between January and June 2015, as compared to 29 978 in the same period last year.
In the period under review, 10 289 commercial vehicles have been imported as compared to 8 597 in 2014.
The Zimbabwe National Road Administration (Zinara) said its systems could not detect if a vehicle had paid or evaded customs duty.
Zinara board chairperson Albert Mugabe said the Zinara vehicle licensing system was only able to license a vehicle with a number plate and a registration book. He said the Zinara system could, however, detect dual registration where two vehicles shared the same registration number.
“Our mandate of vehicle licensing begins when a vehicle has been registered with the Central Vehicle Registry and has a number plate and a registration book,” Mugabe said.
He said Zinara did not impound vehicles for evading duty as this was outside their mandate. However, he said the authority had made positive initiatives to ensure maximum collection of vehicle licensing revenue.
“We embarked on a vehicle licensing blitz nationwide aimed at encouraging licensing defaulters to be compliant. To this extent, our computerised vehicle database has increased to 675 000 and about 70% of these vehicles in our system are licensed and compliant,” he said.
In the period January to June 2015, Zinara recorded a 25% increase in revenue collection — from $22,7 million licensing fees collected last year to $29,2 million.
Tax and customs director at Tax Management Services, Trust Mawere, said there were too many stakeholders involved in vehicle licensing such as Zinara, Zimra, Central Vehicle Registration (CVR) and local authorities.
He said while the decentralisation had brought convenience and public good in terms of accessibility, it had created problems of controls, thereby creating opportunities for the unscrupulous corrupt office bearers in the various stakeholders’ offices.
He said CVR needed to clean up their act and come up with one motor registration agent, preferrably Zimra, which would become the only party answerable and responsible, Mawere said.
“Zinara’s term registration data base should pick registration master data from either Zimra or CVR so that vehicles with fake registrations can also be picked from Zinara at the time of vehicle licencing. Right now the Zinara data base identifies vehicles with registration numbers only, they don’t have names attached to the registration numbers,” he said.