 Good morning or good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, at this great conference. My name is Analkwa Omili Singoma, Assistant Commissioner, Research Planning and Development, Uganda Revenue Authority from Uganda. I start by thanking the UNWIDER team for this great opportunity for us to interact with international researchers, international bodies and the great support they've given us. I thank them for the opportunity that was extended to us to come and attend this conference. However, because of state duties that were very urgent, I'm unable to be there physically. I still thank them for the opportunity that have been given to share with you on this video and take you through my slides. This is a great conference that brings visibility to Africa, visibility to revenue administrations and we know that revenue administrations are the key to the development of our respective countries. When you start a revenue administration, you have touched the country at large. So we thank you so much and all the ones who are funding UNWIDER for supporting our African countries to become independent and self-reliant. I'll now take us through the various slides that I've put together for the conference. I'll start with the slide which has wider collaboration. So wider collaboration at URAA almost 99% of our transactions are online, are automated and because of that we have a lot of data. We have a return which captures each and everything including the supplies for the trader, the sales for the different traders, the employees of all that information we have. And we need to use this information to inform policy, to inform administrative decisions. Based on that, we need to be able to analyze, to model however we've been having capacity challenges in numbers and UNWIDER came in to really support us. We also had the need to develop capacity of our staff. You know very well that researchers always want to publish, researchers want their work used. Previously when we were using less data, some of the work is not used or it is used only inside Uganda Revenue Authority. But we are seeking out to see that our work is used internationally, nationally and in Africa. We've also found that the international researchers find a lot more synergy in working with local experts who have the full knowledge of the institutions. I'll give you an example. One time we had an international researcher who collected data and when they brought the report on audits, they found that our auditors had primary level qualification which has never happened in Uganda Revenue Authority. Why did this happen? Because they collected the data, went off, did the analysis and just brought the report. So we have taken a different trend and the way we are collaborating with UNWIDER is different. And I've seen that even international researchers prefer to work closely with those who can interpret the data which is an advantage to us. I'll now take us to the next slide which is taking us through the collaboration steps. What other steps we are following as we collaborated with UNWIDER? And by the way we've collaborated with UNWIDER, we've collaborated with ICTD, we've collaborated with ATAF and many other researchers from different universities. So as we were collaborating with these researchers, we found that we needed to come up with the rules of engagement. So together with the International Center for Tax and Development, ICTD, the ATAF Africa Tax Administration Forum and Uganda Revenue Authority, we designed a rules of collaboration which we are now using and it is the one that gave the guide for our collaboration with the UNWIDER team. And in that I have also attached a link for all researchers who are interested in researching with African Tax Administrations. You can go to that link and get a guide on how we work together with international researchers. I thank ICTD and ATAF for giving us this visibility. Like I told you previously, for us we were just doing work for just Uganda Revenue Authority and collaboration with these bodies has given us a new lease of life and we are excited. So together with UNWIDER we signed an MOU that was in December 2017. We formed joint teams to do research and I'll give you more details as we continue and this included the URA staff and UNWIDER personnel. And UNWIDER has been so unique. You know, every research body has its unique identifier, it has its unique way it works. And for UNWIDER you have really cracked it because UNWIDER provided us with tools, two high-speed computers. These computers are storing data for researchers and we are looking at URAA becoming a hub for research in Uganda, in East Africa for researchers across the world. So UNWIDER has facilitated this. They've provided us with two high-speed computers where we are putting the data as I'll give you details as we continue. They've provided data software and the internet so this is a new way of working with international researchers whereby it's no longer about collecting data from African institutions but working together with us using our research problems and building capacity along the way, making friends, bonding and knowing people across the world which is phenomenal. URAA on the side of the collaboration provided the information. We have provided information of corporate income tax, personal income tax, presumptive taxpayer register, tax payments and working space. So we have working space where the teams have been coming and working with my teams under the research and planning division which is part of Uganda Revenue Authority. I'll now take us to the next slide that tells us about activities. What are the activities that are ongoing? So in the activities we have capacity building where capacity building has covered starter courses, impact evaluation courses. We've almost never done impact evaluation of policies. We've always analyzed policies on non-annual policies as the policies are approved and measures are read out in the budget. We analyzed the impact that year or the performance that year and that is the end of the story. So in the way that came up with an area that we needed to bridge the gap, what's the impact of these policies. So that is one of the areas. Then tax benefit micro-simulation modelling. Those are the areas of capacity building that we are working with that Unwida is supporting. Then we are looking at also a tax benefit model, UGA mod. This model is being developed. This model combines household level data on incomes, expenditures obtained from our Uganda Bureau of Statistics. Now we've been modelling but we have never used statistics from our household data or expenditures. And we know very well that taxes impact on this or this impact on taxes either way. So this again is a new area with Unwida we are venturing into spheres we never ever imagined. Some of these reports we've been finding them on shelves and I'll share with you another experience. One time I was interacting with researchers and this researcher was from Ethiopia. So the researcher presented and at the end of the day I asked did you interact with Ethiopia Revenue Authority? And she said no I did not. So I asked her so who is going to use your work? And she said I've produced the work and it's up to them. And at that point we're actually with the ICTD. I said this cannot continue. We cannot have researchers that are not implemented. So that also drove the interest. So now with Unwida we are going to carry out research that we are using the data. We understand how it's developed and we can develop policies to support both the public and the revenue generation. So this involves coding and all that then I'll go to the researchers. We are carrying out research with Unwida impact of changing the tax burden of small and medium sized enterprises. We are a developing country Uganda is a developing country and developing countries are developed by their small and medium enterprises. We appreciate the support given to us to activate our economies by the multinationals. However multinationals are from other countries. What belongs to us are the small and medium enterprises. So it's important for us that as we design tax measures or policy measures we are able to generate the revenue that is intended and not hurt these small businesses to close. Because then we cannot develop our country and like I earlier say revenue authorities are the ones that support countries to develop. So with Unwida again we are tapping into that space how do we collect revenue but also protect our small and medium businesses. We are also looking at impact of reform in the personal income tax. How is it impacting revenue and how is it impacting inequality. Is it equal? Is it fair across the board? Are the ones earning less paying the optimum tax and the ones earning a lot paying the higher tax. We currently have a top up on whoever is earning the highest bracket. They pay 40 percent of their personal income tax and generally how is it being manifested within the country. So this is also an area that is virgin. It's an area we need to look at because you know that some of our countries we are depending more on the corporate income taxes yet we need to depend more on the personal income taxes that bring in more revenues. So we are looking at this and again you can see we are looking at inequality. So it's not only the side of revenue and that's the beauty of our interaction with Unwida. They are bringing in both revenue but the people aspect is it equal. When we look at small and medium enterprises what's the impact? What's the burden on them? So that is the people side of it all which is very interesting and it is a new way of thinking and I'll tell you that currently our government is looking at how to improve policy development. So Unwida is here at the right time and the beauty with this is that they are working together with us so at the end of the day we are in this home together. It's not a report that is handed down to us and we are just extracting. We're also looking at another research which is tax payments by multinationals. Do they pay anything anyway in our respective countries or is all the money expatriated? Are they paying what is optimum? So we are going to look at how it is in Uganda using research methodology. So those are the various activities that are going on between us and Unwida. I'll now quickly take us through the progress. How far have we progressed on these activities? In the terms of capacity building the research teams have been trained on the courses I mentioned and we have joint execution of projects that have also equipped staff with hands-on skills as we interact with the Jukas, Maria. My staff are improving in their skills of modelling, data cleaning, data analysis and all that. In terms of the Yuga Mod, the model has been coded. The tax rules are completed. It now awaits a completion of household data. Which the team is working on and testing. And you know our challenges in Africa with data. But trust me where we are going our data is now going to be very usable for decision making. So we expect to complete this model by the end of October. When we look at the researchers I've already said quite a lot about the researchers. The studies have all been scoped. Most of the data objectives have been extracted. The analysis is going on. And we expect to have a deeper analysis and starting handwriting mid-October. We have that team for univider coming in. And we are going to sit together with them. Analyze this data and get other questions and write and come up with recommendations. And this workshop is taking place in Uganda. On the part of the data that is being collected I want to share a little more. Is we have experienced a level of knowledge that helps us to clean this data into usable formats. To mask this data so that it's available for other researchers. So I'll now take us to the next, the last slide which is about our future plans with Univider. What are our future plans as Uganda as Uganda Revenue Authority, as Research Planning and Development. One of the things we're looking at is all you are at data is going to be extracted. Anonimized so that we do not expose our taxpayers names and our taxpayers details but have data available for research and analysis. And it's going to be placed in one location in Research Planning and Development Office. And I told you that Univider gave us high speed computers which can store a lot of data. So we are looking at this in a big way. I know that in South Africa it's at the Treasury in Uganda it's at Uganda Revenue Authority and we are very proud of that. We are working together with Univider and will make this data available. We'll make it available to researchers across the world to be able to carry out research and analysis and to support. We realized that as you are, I have only 45 staff not all of them are researchers because we do research, we do that planning for the organization, strategy, we advance who support development partner, coordination and all that. So we cannot as research and planning do all the researches. We cannot as URAA do all the researches because we currently opened up to all URAA staff to be able to do researches. We give them research questions, they carry out researches and we use what comes through but again we realize we cannot do it as URAA. So we opened up to national research firms. We have MOUs with our national research firms so they come in and we work with them and whatever comes through we share for decision making. So we then realize we can't do it again as a country. We opened up to international researchers and that's how we welcomed Univider, ICTD and many others, IGC. We are working with all these people and Univider, you have cracked it because you have provided us the facility to give everyone of these people information to do analysis and come up with policy proposals. So the process has already started. We have extracted quite some of the data of VAT imports, exports, local excise and we are currently developing user guides which will give you explanation of the various variables so that we can, this data can be usable. We are developing an MOU, it's kind of an MOU, an agreement which every researcher will sign to be able to give back the recommendations and how we work together to be able to access this data. And we are also preparing a space where some researchers can come in, sit, extract the data and work from there and be able to come up with information. We are looking at starting the Uganda Revenue Authority staff so that together with them we can continue to clean this data and make it usable. Then we shall move to the Ministry of Finance whom we work with to develop policy and avail this to all of them. We'll move to the National Research Bodies, avail this information and to the International Research Bodies. So we look at a very bright future and we hope that by December 2019 this information will be available for use. So I welcome you all, the professors, researchers, universities. I welcome you all to interact with us. We support each other, make friends, bond and make an impact on our respective countries. Once again, I appreciate Unwida for all the support. I thank you all for listening to me and I am ready to receive comments and questions online. I will answer each and every one of them and I'm looking forward to interacting with all of you at another opportunity when I'll be able to be there physically. Thank you, thank you so much. In Uganda we say Muevali Nyo That is in Uganda. Thank you once again.