Arusha — Tanzania Revenue Authority (TRA) in Arusha Region has surpassed its set targets in collecting revenues for the last nine months, though entry ports customs collection suffered backlash.

Arusha TRA Manager, Mr Apil Mbarouk, said the Regional Branch of the Revenue arm has managed to raise 184,554,262,057/- up to March 2016, which is cumulative collection of nine months since July, last year.

Mr Mbarouk explained that the 185.5bn/- figure is slightly more than 102 per cent of its initially set target for the same period between the months of July 2015 and March 2016.

"We had initially targeted to collect 180,140,780,000/- for the nine months, but have already gone past that figure," said the TRA manager.

The development for this year, according to the head tax collector here, is also promising, because TRA had planned to collect a revenue of 18.82 billion/- in the first three months of 2016, but so far between January and March, this year, Arusha office managed to raise 20.33 billion/- which is equivalent to 108 per cent.

He added further that TRA had planned to collect 17.9 billion/- in February 2016, but they have surpassed it by getting 18.24 billion/- which is around 102 percent, while for the month of March, the authority managed to collect 24.4 billion/- which again has gone past its 22.0 billion/- target by 111 per cent.

The statement from TRA points out that revenue collections suffered the fact that the Customs office at Namanga border, which has been another reliable cash cow, is now facing reduced collection due to the fact that many of the goods using the transit happen to fall under the East African Community (EAC) exemptions.

Due to that and other factors, therefore, the duty collections at the border and other points of entry (including airports) fell from the set target of 7.8 billion/- down to the bitter reality of 5.4 billion/- for the past three months, which is around 64 per cent of the set target.