The United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DfID) and Rwanda Revenue Authority (RRA) will end a decade-long partnership in which the latter received support worth more than £24 million, the Communications and Results Manager for DfID, Serge Wiclef, said yesterday.

Wiclef told The New Times that over the past years, DfID’s assistance was directed at putting in place laws and regulations under which the authority was established.

"DfID support also furnished a state-of-the-art new office building, built a durable set of IT and human resource management systems under which all business is now conducted, and provided expert technical assistance across the breadth of the RRA’s mandate,” he said

Wiclef added that the effectiveness of the RRA in recent years has been a major factor underpinning Rwanda’s impressive development performance including universal primary education and expanded access to health services.

"The period of our support has seen a six fold increase in the volume of taxes collected by the RRA. In 2008, for the first time since the Genocide, 50 percent of the budget was funded by domestically generated revenues,” he said

When asked if the closure of the partnership would not affect his institution, the Director of Tax Payers’ Services Department; Gerald Nkusi, told The New Times that DfID had equipped them with the necessary tools.

"I do not think that the closure of the partnership will affect us because there was enough capacity building, we now have experienced staff and right now, we are exceeding our target via tax collections,” he said

Nkusi also said that RRA was evaluating all sectors of the institution to ascertain the impact and value the DfID support has added to the company. The results will be made public on Friday.

Last year, the management procedures of RRA were awarded ISO 2008 accreditation making it the first Rwandan institution to attain this standard.

Currently, RRA is an adviser and provider of direct technical support for the establishment of a new revenue authority in neighbouring Burundi.

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