A SIGNIFICANT number of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) fear that their system will not be compatible with the Fiji Revenue Customs Services database.
Nadi businessman Chandu Lodhia raised this concern while posing a question to Fiji Revenue and Customs chief executive officer Udit Singh during the Nadi Chamber of Commerce and Industry Post budget conference on Saturday.
“You’ve got a very unbounding task of collecting, meeting the revenue targets but you did say in your introduction just now that you will have some challenges in implementing Vat Monitoring System (VMS),” he said.
“I think towards the later part of the year, I did raise it with the Honourable Minister, and I think your senior staff were also present at that venue. What do you think are the challenges and are you confident of meeting those challenges.
“There was a lot of panic, and a lot of people ended up changing the generic software at enormous cost to their business.”
In response, Mr Singh said Fiji has a big shadow economy that rested in this area where it was not digitised.
“What we’re trying to do by reducing the threshold, you’ll notice that the VAT threshold remains the same, but what we’ve done is we’ve actually reduced the VMS threshold,” he said.
Mr Singh said this was also an effort try to bring these people into the into the net and get more transparency and digitise.
“We understand there’s going to be some challenges, and there’s going to be some costs related to point of sales systems and so what we’re going to do in the next six months or is to try and activate a low-cost point of sale system.
“We’ve actually got a free point of sale system that’s available to small businesses now, but what we will do is we’ll build on that.”
Mr Singh said the FRCS will partner with external parties to try and provide a solution that will be cost effective.
“It won’t be without its challenges, but we had the same issue when we actually rolled VMS out and so this is phase three, and we will work with the business community to try and make sure that the impact is as effortless as possible.”
