Egypt announces start of electronic season for receiving 2020 tax returns

CAIRO – 12 January 2021: Head of the Egyptian Tax Authority, Reda Abdel Kader announced the start of the tax return season for the year 2020-2021.

Abdel Kader clarified in a statement, Tuesday, that the Egyptian Tax Authority receives tax returns for the year 2020, from January 1 to March 31, 2021, for natural persons electronically.

He added that the authority also receives the declarations of legal persons represented by (money companies and individuals’ companies), from the first of January until the first of May 2021 or within 4 months from the date of the end of the company's financial year electronically.

He pointed out that the financiers in the centers of large and medium financiers and the Center for Senior Free Professions will submit their tax declarations on the new system of automated tax procedures as of January 1, 2021, on the website www.eta.gov.eg

 Abdel Kader added that this is with the continuation of the rest of the financiers in the rest of the Republic's offices to submit their declarations electronically on the website of the current department at www.incometax.gov.eg.

Head of the Egyptian Tax Authority noted that during the previous season of the declarations, only money companies and individual companies (a solidarity company, a simple partnership or a reality) were obligated to submit their declarations electronically, but during this season, the natural persons financiers are obligated to submit the tax declaration electronically, starting from the first of January 2021.

He emphasized that the authority provides all the facilities to the financiers during the reporting season through the department's integrated call center, which receives all inquiries regarding the steps for submitting the tax declaration electronically, by calling the hotline (16395), or by e-mail info@eta.gov.eg.

He appealed to all financiers to quickly register on the Egyptian Tax Authority's website. So that there is no competition and great pressure on the site at the end of the season, which may negatively affect the quality and efficiency of the electronic submission service.

For his part, Minister of Finance Mohamed Maait stressed the importance of the digital transformation project, in its comprehensive sense, to modernize and automate the tax administration system, as the "electronic declarations system" contributed to raising the efficiency of tax examination and collection.

He said that this electronic system aims to keep pace with global systems, and to provide an accurate database of buying and selling transactions at the state level. In a way that contributes to verifying the validity of the data contained in the tax declarations, as well as contributing to ending the abuses and loopholes that were left by paperwork, whether fake bills or incorrect data.

Maait explained that all taxpayers, whether natural persons or legal persons, are obligated to submit the tax declaration electronically, in accordance with the text of Article (32) of the Unified Tax Procedures Law promulgated by Law 206 of 2020.