KAMPALA- The Uganda Revenue Authority (URA) has on August 4 issued an apology to the public after a video of their staff abandoning clients to attend a birthday party went viral.
The 45-seconds-long video was posted by a one Michael Ssuuna on Facebook showing staff leaving clients unattended to at the counters.
“We deeply apologise to our clients for this unfortunate experience. We are investigating this matter,” reads a tweet from URA.
The tax body added that “URA is a client-focused and responsive organization & this is not the URA way. We assure our clients great customer experience always. It is because of you that we exist.”
URA Public and Corporate Affairs Manager Ian Rumanyika tweeted and promised to investigate the incident as soon as possible.
“Thank you, Ssuuna Micheal and Daily Monitor for bringing this to our attention. Very unfortunate incident if found to be true. At URA we promise excellent revenue services everywhere, all the time. The Taxpayer is King!” Rumanyika tweeted.
The incident created criticism among the public especially on social media as it was highly condemned.
Affection Birungi wrote, “Service at URA is bad! In that particular office, the only professional and courteous person is Norah Muhindo. The rest of the staff abandons their work stations at 4:15 pm regardless of the people that have been assigned to their queue. You need a floor manager to guide clients.”
“Government employees are the most incompetent people in this country the drivers are reckless the office people come to work late leave early always want to be bribed to do anything and so arrogant,” Brian Nandala tweeted.
However, there are some individuals who came out and defended URA alleging that the incident happened during a break.
“This birthday celebration took about 2 minutes only, I was there n this all issue is overrated. Actually, the birthday celebration break-time was far better than the time we waste on the queue as the officers are working on applications coming from the supervisors.” Onesimus Ssuna wrote in a tweet.
