Staff Writer 
THE figures speak for themselves.
When fewer than a quarter of small businesses comply with tax obligations, and three-quarters of the broader economy operates in the shadows, no amount of political ambition will close the gap between revenue targets and reality.
Zimbabwe’s tax system is structurally ill-suited to the economy it is meant to serve.
The government deserves credit for acknowledging that broadening the tax base, rather than squeezing existing compliant businesses ever harder, is the correct priority.
A medium-term revenue strategy and a commitment to digitalisation are steps in the right direction. But strategy documents and well-intentioned rhetoric have a poor track record of translating into meaningful change without the institutional discipline to back them up.
What Zimbabwe urgently needs is simplification. Small and medium enterprises, the backbone of the economy, responsible for the lion’s share of employment and economic output, are not evading tax out of wickedness.
They are opting out of a system that remains bewilderingly complex, administratively burdensome, and demonstrably unrewarding.
When compliance costs more in time and money than non-compliance, rational actors will choose the easier path. The answer is not heavier enforcement alone, it is making compliance the path of least resistance, or at least more so.
That means a unified digital portal designed around the realities of how small businesses actually operate. It means eliminating the layering of presumptive taxes that leaves operators paying multiple levies without receiving the clearance certificates that would actually protect them.
And it means linking formal tax registration to tangible benefits such as access to credit, preferential procurement, and recognised trading status, so that formalisation becomes an opportunity rather than a punishment.
Beyond mechanics, however, lies a deeper problem of trust. Citizens will not willingly fund a state whose spending they cannot scrutinise.
Corruption in public enterprises, opaque procurement, and the persistent sense that tax revenues disappear into a poorly governed system corrode the civic compact on which voluntary compliance depends.
No revenue authority, however, technologically sophisticated, can substitute for visible, accountable government.
Zimbabwe’s tax-to-GDP ratio must rise substantially if the country is ever to fund the public services its people deserve. But that journey begins not with threats of audits and doorstep visits, but with a system worthy of the confidence it asks its citizens to place in it.
