Sunday, September 6, 2015

Egypt introduces new value-added tax!

Egypt offers lottery and discounts to promote new value-added tax
Egypt's finance ministry will issue lottery prizes in order to motivate businesses to issue receipts and citizens to demand them, to promote popular observation of the soon-to-be imposed value-added tax. The ministry said in a statement on Saturday that it would hold a monthly lottery benefiting up to a thousand citizens from each governorate, with annual prizes valued at a total of EGP5m. The statement did not give further details about the operation of the lottery. The date of implementation of the long-awaited value-added tax has not yet been announced, but Finance Minister Hani Qadri Dimian told last week that the law establishing the tax would be approved by the cabinet “within weeks.” As an additional measure to support the introduction of the tax, the government will also implement a temporary 5% discount on the total value-added tax paid for goods, and a 15% discount on taxes paid for services. The new tax will be imposed on each additional stage in the production process, to ultimately distribute the tax over all contributors to a final product. The long-delayed tax will set a fixed rate on the consumption of most goods and services, with the exception of socially sensitive goods and services, such as some food products. The ministry, however, expects a “one-time and minimal” rise in general price levels. The amendments also keep the sales tax rate on automotives unchanged. (Source: Ahram Online)
The recent years have witnessed a major increase in all kind of taxes which led to an increase in the price level of all services and goods, together with a stronger dollar and decrease in export, which may lead to social unrest by low income population in millions, specially that they don't see any increase in quality of public services offered by the government specially health, education and human rights. Instead of the intense investment by the government in infrastructure projects, experts think it is also very important to invest in human asset specially education and health, in a country where almost 50% of the population do not read or write and over 50% are virus c positive, and the government is not doing anything about it except producing nice slogans by the President, who is widely criticized for human rights violence and depression of democracy.

No comments:

Post a Comment