Real Estate transactions:

Electronic filing of tax returns begins on 1st June

The Director General of Taxation made the announcement at a press briefing in Yaounde on 23 May 2016.

By Ojong Steven Ayukogem in Yaounde

Director General of Taxation,

 MopaModesteFatoing

Electronic filing of tax returns of real estate transactions will go operational in Yaounde and Douala as from Wednesday the 1st of June 2016. This was the take home message from a press briefing granted by the Director General of Taxation, at the taxation headquarters in Yaounde, on Monday last week.

                Addressing a battery of journalists drawn from the national and international press, MopaModesteFatoing said the new electronic filing procedure is part of vast reforms presently implemented at the Taxation department.

                The reforms seek among other things to boost the capacity of the tax administration in mobilizing resources, simplify and modernize procedures to enable tax payers to avoid wasting valuable time, create a user-friendly and convivial atmosphere for tax payers to accomplish their obligations towards the tax administration and also avoid unnecessary contacts between tax payers and tax agents.

                To accomplish this task therefore, businessmen operating in the real estate sector are called upon to create their e-filing accounts on the website of the DGI-www.impots.cm or contact the special registration and stamp duty unit so as to be schooled on the new E-filing procedure.

                It should be mentioned that the new procedure replaces the old and obsoleted manual filling of tax returns at the specialized tax centres in Yaounde and Douala. The new procedure was a recommendation of the Cameroon Business Forum that ended recently in Douala, where the tax department took an active part in the deliberations.

                The innovation in this procedure is that henceforth, registration dues will be automatically calculated via the aid of a special software created for the purpose. This software automatically generates a “tax payment slip” that will permit the taxpayer to know the amount he is supposed to pay to the tax administration.

                Thus the old time-consuming system whereby tax payers had to make repeated contacts with tax agents, apart from standing on long queues and manually filing their tax returns is now a thing of the past.

                Another virtue of the new system is that it brings more flexibility to the taxpayer as to where and when he can do the E-filing. It also substantially reduces the time spent on the registration and also the contact between taxpayer and tax agents.

NB: See explanatory note on page six.