DAVID MUWANGA

KAMPALA, UGANDA - the Uganda Revenue Authority (URA) has refuted findings of the East African Bribery Index 2010 report that ranked the institution in the fourth position out of 44 others as the most corrupt in the East African Community (EAC).

A statement issued by the Assistant Commissioner for Public and Corporate Affairs, Ms. Sarah Banage, said the report was based on a sample of respondents interviewed who are not stakeholders in URA.

She said 80% of the respondents were from rural areas, 34.9% of whom are self employed and the bulk are either students or non- employed.

"The spread of respondents interviewed do not interact regularly with the institution by way of seeking services to which bribes may have been solicited as the report indicated,' she explained.

"This is because the bracket of rural communities interviewed are not URA stakeholders and hence are not representative respondents as the authority interfaces daily with the clearing and forwarding agents who were not interviewed," she said.

She said the authority has carried out a restructuring process that include the 2006 Integrity Enhancement Plan which has among others carried out independent surveys to establish how URA was and is perceived.

She said the findings carried out by Research Data and Computer Centre (RDC) Ltd, an independent research firm in March 2010 to evaluate whether the integrity of URA has improved over the past five years showed that 69.7% of the public agreed that the institution's integrity had improved.