Published on : 6/05/21 3:20 AM
For the first time in its history were held from September 7 to 12, 2020, the Special Conferences on the Budgeting of Non-tax Revenue. This conference was instituted by the Minister of Finance, Mr. Louis Paul Motaze to improve the forecast of this category of revenue in the budget, to revitalize the monitoring and collection in the administrations, all for a better consideration in the Finance Act 2021.
These special conferences on the budgeting of non-tax revenues take place in a very particular context. Indeed, in the face of the expenses, the country’s internal revenues are increasingly modest and even very insufficient to meet them, despite the significant efforts of the administrations of the tax base. It was therefore time for the Directorate General of the Budget to think about making a more assertive contribution from this category of revenue through technical assistance to the sectoral ministries concerned.
The main objective of these conferences was to improve the forecasting and budgeting of non-tax revenues. But more specifically it was a question of developing a list of all non-tax revenues, to ensure the legal fact generating the said revenue, for a possible regularization, the financial system of the State enacting that any compulsory levy is the sole responsibility of the Finance Act, to examine niches of new non-tax revenues, on the proposal of the administration concerned, to assess the effectiveness of the collection system of each revenue and, to assess the performance and forecast of each type of revenue for the year 2021.
At the end of the work of the aforementioned conferences, some observations were made, in particular: A large number of revenues collected within the administrations are not instituted by law, as stipulated in the State’s financial regime; There are important revenue niches within certain administrations that need to be explored; the repayments recorded in the Treasury do not always correspond to the amounts collected by the administrations, thus highlighting the problem of securing non-tax revenues, among others.
As recommendations, the conferences drew some lessons, namely To update and adapt, if necessary, the texts constituting the legal basis for the collection of the various non-tax revenues, To intensify the missions of control and follow-up of the collected revenues, in collaboration with the sectoral administrations and the programs of securitization of the said revenues, To elaborate a model of projection of the non-tax revenues at the Ministry of Finance, in order to reduce the differences observed between the forecasts and the realizations.
It should be recalled that the situation of Cameroon’s public finances is characterized by a rapid increase in public spending due, among other things, to the multiple commitments of the State relating to the accomplishment of its regalian missions of security and defense, the increasingly important burden of servicing the public debt, but also due to the commitments relating to the implementation of development projects, in line with the vision of emergence by 2035.
