URA Initially Asked For Shs117B in Presidential Handshake – Auditor General

By Serestino Tusingwire

Auditor General John Muwanga on Monday told the parliamentary committee investigating the UGX6bn payout that the Uganda Revenue Authority had initially sought a supplementary budget of Shs117 billion but the finance ministry only considered Shs6 billion.

Muwanga re­vealed that he re­ceived a let­ter from the Min­is­ter of Fi­nance, Ma­tia Ka­saija on Oc­to­ber 19, 2016 re­quest­ing for a sup­ple­men­tary bud­get of Ugx 117 bil­lion for 2015/​16 fi­nan­cial year and sought an au­dit war­rant.

Asked by leg­is­la­tors on whether the AG’s of­fice had con­ducted an au­dit on the Shs6bil­lion, Muwanga said no pre-au­dit of the ex­pen­di­ture has been con­ducted yet.

He also re­vealed that the money was spent with­out re­ceiv­ing an au­dit war­rant.

“The money had been spent by the time the Min­is­ter wrote to me,” the Au­di­tor Gen­eral stated.

The money that was later used to pay 42 government officials involved in the oil tax cases was considered urgent.

Later on the day, Bank of Uganda Gov­er­nor, Em­manuel Mute­bile, also ap­peared be­fore the com­mit­tee to give the MPs a break­down of money so far re­ceived by gov­ern­ment from oil re­lated rev­enues.

A state­ment pre­sented by BOU in­di­cated that Uganda has so far re­ceived Ugx 2.4 tril­lion ($696 mil­lion) in cap­i­tal gains tax and non-tax re­lated rev­enue.

This also in­cludes Ugx 10 bil­lion re­lated to min­eral roy­al­ties, sur­face rentals, train­ing fees from min­eral ex­plo­ration com­pa­nies re­ceived through the Min­istry of En­ergy.

How­ever, leg­is­la­tors were not satisfied with the sta­tis­tics and asked the cen­tral bank to rec­on­cile its figures with the Min­istry of En­ergy and make a more de­tailed re­port.