THABO Khasipe, the Commissioner General of the Lesotho Revenue Authority (LRA), an organisation that is responsible for the assessment, collection and remittance to the Government of public revenues in Lesotho says innovations form part of the main priorities of LRA and in as much as they work with money, it is financial capital which needs to be supported with other sources of capital.
business
Dec. 8, 2021
OWN CORRESPONDENT
3 min read
Capital sources required to support financial capital – Khasipe
LRA boss, Thabo Khasipe
Story highlights
Team Veteran wins LRA Hackathon open platform competition
The event was intended to strike strategic partnership with key stakeholders
He was speaking at the end of a three-day LRA Hackathon open platform for young innovators, which ended in Berea on Tuesday.
As part of the event, the LRA also held the Hackathon open platform competition for the innovators and Team Veteran walked away with the first prize, winning cash worth M30 000.
The competition was intended to strike strategic partnership with key stakeholders in order to invite innovative ideas and processes which can be implemented to address compliance issues.
Mr Khasipe said it is possible that the LRA is the first revenue authority in the region to host such an event, adding that if the innovators could design beautiful systems, they could sell such ideas to the rest of Africa because tax revenue systems are the same in most countries.
“We are overwhelmed by the support from our sponsors who included Vodacom Lesotho, ECONET and African Tax Administration Forum (ATAF),” he said.
Acknowledging all participants, the Commissioner General said they should be proud of themselves, congratulating the winners for their hard work and commitment as well as the judges for a job well done.
Bokang Thola of Team Veteran expressed his gratitude to the LRA on behalf of his teammates for pioneering such an august event.
“I also wish to applaud the sponsors for coming up with such an innovative project and we wish that other organisations and companies could embrace innovation in a similar manner. We have also learnt a lot, more especially about tax issues and other new technologies,” he said.
Mr Thola added: “Indeed we feel honoured to have been granted such an opportunity to be part of this big event and to eventually win the competition.”
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Tumisang Liphoto, who was one of the judges in the competition, said some of the challenges they encountered included people who did not present their architectural systems.
He said most of the solutions which were proposed were taken for granted, adding that it is not easy to get access to data.
Mr Liphoto said most of the data was unstructured, adding that many presenters were not able to tell how and why they had selected a certain model.
However, he said most of the solutions presented by the participants were brilliant and worthy for the LRA to implement.
The runners up in the competition were Finhack Team and they pocketed a sum of M20 000 while Team Morogo appeared third collecting M10 000. LeNA
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