Last Thursday RRA met with Professional accountants and ICPAR members to inform them about the new reforms being implemented to ease tax payment. In last year’s Ease of Doing Business report of the World Bank, Rwanda was ranked the 29^th easiest place to do business in the world. On the paying taxes indicator in particular, Rwandan was ranked 35^th globally and 3^rd on the African continent. This year RRA is implementing more reforms to continuously reduce the cost of doing business in matters of tax administration. The first reform being implemented this year is the timely payment of VAT refunds; today all VAT refund claims are processed and paid within 30 days. This has largely been enabled by the use of technology in tax administration. VAT refund claims are now submitted through the E-Tax Portal which has significantly led to reductions in the time required to comply with VAT declarations and issuance of VAT refunds to taxpayers RRA is also implementing a single unified declaration form which combines PAYE, Pension, and Maternity leave and Medical Insurance scheme contributions all in one. This will tremendously reduced the time it used to take taxpayers to make separate payments and declarations for these different contributions. Another major reform being implemented this year is the “automated audit case” selection process. This is a risk based case selection process that is implemented through RRA’s Business Intelligence system every fiscal year. The system uses a risk rules engine to identify and select taxpayers that will be subjected to audit based on their declarations and compliance history. The automated audit case selection assesses taxpayer data against a combination of the major risk parameters as follows: Risk rules are built based on the key functions of taxpayers: a)      Registration risk rules b)      Filing risk rules c)      Acurate reporting risk rules d)     Payment risk rules   This reform will greatly enhance transparency and efficiency in the tax audit selection and administration processes ensuring that only truly risky cases are subjected to audits. RRA remains committed to making it easier for taxpayers to meet their obligations and boost the trust and confidence of the public in the tax adminstration processes.