The Ethiopian Revenues & Customs Authority (ERCA) launched a training for medium taxpayers on using its electronic tax return filing system online on October 14, 2013, Fortune reported.

Currently, only large taxpayers with annual turnover of more than 27 million Ethiopian birr are using the e-filing system.

After the completion of the training, the Authority is planning to extend the service to medium tax payers following encouraging successes with large taxpayers.

“The service first started as a pilot project by the Authority in 2010,” said Fekadu Tadesse, customer service coordinator at the Large Tax Payers Office at ERCA. “Customers can inform us of their taxes via the Internet and we then send them a printout with a code, through which they can come to the office and pay.”

The training launched last week, takes two days to complete and is given to 20 to 30 trainees in each session free of charge.

ERCA is planning to launch its e-file system only after the training of all 16,000 middle income business and its is targeting to train up to 4,000 people this fiscal year alone, according to Fortune.

E-file is part of the e-tax project of the Authority financed by the Investment Climate Facilitation for Africa (ICF), which seeks to streamline all tax filing in the country by allowing taxpayers to declare their taxes through the internet.

Source: Fortune