The Swedish Embassy in Bosnia and Herzegovina will continue to support the tax administrations in BiH in the future to improve its work aiming to transform into modern, reliable and serviceable tax administrations through the project “Strengthening the Capacities of the Tax Administrations in BiH” in which the Tax Administration of the Republic of Srpska participates.
The above mentioned was highlighted at the meeting held in the director’s office in Banja Luka today between Director of the Tax Administration of the Republic of Srpska Zora Vidovic and Swedish Ambassador in BiH Anders Hagelberg and his coworkers.
At this meeting, interlocutors are exchanged information about how the project “Strengthening the Capacities of theTtax Administrations in BiH” implementation is going, on which members from all four tax administrations in BiH work together with experts from the Swedish Tax Agency, which is financed by the Swedish Embassy in BiH. Besides that, they spoke about the possibilities and challenges of the transformation and about capacity improvement of the Tax Administration of the Republic of Srpska, as well as possibilities of implementation of new ideas through this project with introduction of new areas into the project in the future.
Director Vidovic highlighted that she is encouraged by the achievement of the project realization and she expressed the expectation that its realization will be more efficient with the aim of taking the best practices from colleagues from the Swedish Tax Agency. She added that this is a very important project within the Tax Administration of the Republic of Srpska will adopt positive experiences from their colleagues from Sweden and on the base of that experiences they will improve their work.
Otherwise, this Project will continue three and a half years i.e. until December 31, 2020, and its total value is 26,500,000 Swedish crowns (BAM 5, 4 million) and is financed by the Swedish Agency for International Development – SIDA. During 2015, experts from Swedish Tax Agency are, with the employees from all four tax administrations, identified key areas that are common for all four administrations in BiH and in which the improvement would like to be achieved. In that period, three priority areas have been identified on which specialized teams from Swedish Tax Agency and tax administrations in BiH will work separately, and those areas are:
- Change of Mindset of the Employees in the Tax Administration
- Taxpayer Service
- Compliance Risk Management
In the area of Change of Mindset of the Employees in the Tax Administrations the improvement would like to be achieved in creation of trust between tax administration and taxpayer, as well as behavioral change of tax officers and strengthening of internal communication. When it comes to Taxpayer Service, the main aim of this area within the Project is improvement of communication with taxpayers through strategy services development with improvement of “Call Centre” function, implementation of prefilling possibilities of tax returns, i.e. „Prefilling” and similar. In the third priority area related to risk analysis, the improvement would like to be achieved in models with risks management in order to properly select taxpayers who don’t fulfill their liabilities on time, i.e. in the legally prescribed deadlines.
