Radar | May 04,2024
Officials of the Addis Abeba Finance Bureau have warned sector institutions and district offices against issuing withholding tax receipts without their approval, arguing that doing so violates the revenue administration system in place.
Beginning next week, the Bureau will distribute printed revenue-collection and withholding-tax receipts to institutions, an intervention intended to restore order and keep receipt issuance within what officials describe as the proper supervisory channel.
That warning follows confusion created by the rollout of a new QR-coded receipt system introduced in December last year. The latest tax receipt dispute lays bare the strains of a hurried administrative transition, in which a city finance bureaucracy is trying to reassert chain-of-command control. A federal revenue modernisation drive is pushing QR-coded compliance, and a printing monopoly is struggling to keep up with demand.
At issue is not only who prints withholding and revenue-collection receipts, but also who governs accountability when a tax system is being rebuilt in real time. According to officials at the Ministry of Revenue, the reform is part of an effort to modernise tax administration, improve transparency, provide secure documentation for taxpayers, reduce fraud, and strengthen the fight against tax evasion. The new receipts are supposed to make tax compliance more traceable and harder to manipulate.
But the reform has collided with operational reality. The state-owned Berhanena Selam Printing Enterprise remains the sole producer of the new receipt pads, creating a bottleneck in a rapidly expanding system. The Enterprise initially committed to printing 700,000 QR-coded pads. Demand later surged, lifting the target to 2.5 million pads and stretching production capacity. Of the 291,435 taxpayers who ordered the new pads, 289,291 have received them, leaving 2,144 still waiting.
That pressure is no longer confined to the 347,000 taxpayers registered in the city in 2025. In Addis Abeba, the rollout extends across 11 districts, 119 woredas, and more than 130 sector bureaus expected to adopt the new format. As mandatory compliance widened, so did the risk of administrative confusion. Under the directive governing receipt use and administration, the Addis Abeba Finance Bureau is mandated to oversee revenue collection receipts used by city bureaus, while the Revenue Bureau supervises withholding and VAT receipts.
The split is intended to preserve oversight and accountability. In practice, however, it appears to have become a source of misunderstanding.
According to Abdulkadir Redwan, head of the city’s Finance Bureau, some sector bureaus attempted to print revenue collection and withholding tax receipts on their own after the Ministry of Revenue announced the shift to QR-coded receipts.
"These efforts were driven less by deliberate defiance than by confusion and lack of awareness, with some institutions apparently assuming that compliance with the new system allowed them to arrange their own printing," he told Fortune.
Abdulkadir did not disclose how many bureaus were involved and declined to identify the institutions concerned.
A revenue collection receipt is issued by institutions for income collected from services they provide. A withholding receipt, by contrast, is issued to a vendor or service provider when part of a payment is withheld for tax purposes. In both cases, control over issuance is inseparable from control over record-keeping, sequencing, and auditability.
To contain the disruption, the Finance Bureau has begun printing the required receipts in-house after collecting requests from bureaus, with the city's treasury covering production costs. Several batches have already been printed, and distribution is scheduled in the coming days. The immediate objective is to stop institutions from improvising around shortages and to ensure receipt numbers are not duplicated.
Dawit Kejela, a former Ministry of Revenue auditor now working as a private tax adviser, argues that centralised printing strengthens transparency and accountability by allowing tax officials to monitor the process more effectively. Allowing institutions to print independently, he warns, could create loopholes, weaken oversight, and disrupt monitoring. Both he and the Bureau’s officials believe the intervention is a safeguard against duplication, redundancy, and inconsistency.
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