22 million properties have been registered since January under the national project of properties inventory that aims to count property wealth across the country and register it in an online database as well as modernise and automate Egypt’s property tax management and its related procedures, Minister of Finance Mohamed Maait stated on Tuesday.
The project concentrates on simplifying, merging, and digitising property tax-associated procedures in conformity with Egypt’s Vision 2030 and its ‘Digital Egypt’ national project, Maait expounded.
He also said that 84,000 citizens submitted their housing units' statements to the Digital Egypt platform by the end of March.
“The Egyptian Real Estate Taxation Authority initiated the registering of three million paper statements on the online platform, which citizens have submitted by the end of March to be linked to the properties’ online database. Each property will be registered with the national ID of the owner on the database,” Anwar Fawzy, the chief of The Egyptian Real Estate Taxation Authority, illustrated.
In November 2019, the Ministry of Finance kicked off a comprehensive national project that targets the automation and digitisation of tax administration in collaboration with a number of international companies specialised in digitisation, including IBM, SAP, and Ernst & Young.
The Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, the Administrative Control Authority, and Egypt’s e-finance company have also participated in the process.
The action came as a bid to merge the informal sector into the formal one, combat tax evasion, as well as catalyse local and foreign investments.
It will also boost Egypt’s public revenues, address the budget deficit, and reduce public debt.
The platform comes under the unified tax law umbrella, which received the cabinet’s approval in June 2019.
Egypt seeks to raise tax revenues in FY2021/2022 by 1.9 percent to reach EGP 983 billion.
