The Government of Uganda has introduced an OTT TAX that will be effective 1st July 2018. The Social Media tax is an excise duty on over the top (OTT) services. Users will have to pay a UGX 200 levy per day of access.
What are OTT services?
OTT services mean “the transmission or receipt of voice or messages over the internet protocol network and includes access to virtual private networks”
Social Media Tax will be levied on the following OTT services.
The government intends to tax any OTT sites similar to the examples listed below.
- Kik
- Meet Me
- Chatouts
- Moment
- Grindr
- Live Talk
- Truecaller
- Google Hangouts
- Google Allo
- Viber
- SnapChat
- LINE
- Phone+
- Call Free
- Signal
- StealthChat
- Telegram
- TextMe
- IM+
- TalkU
- iMessenger
- LOVOO
- Yahoo Messenger
- Drupe
- Facetime
- Text Me
- Android Messages
- imo
- New Messenger
- Hangouts Dialer.
- Textra
- CallerID
- magicApp
- WiCall
- Skype
- Badoo
- Hitwe
- In Message
- Say Hi
- Hi5
- iPair-Meet
- freevideo Mail.Ru
- Tumblr
- Zalo
- Kakao Talk
- Mood
- Plus
- BBM-Free
- Voxer Walkie Talkie
- hike
- Tinder
- Meet Me
OTT tax
The OTT tax will be charged on all of the above services. All services related to the above will also attract an OTT tax.
However, email services are currently not considered as taxable OTT services. Also, video streaming, such as Ugandan television and iflix are currently not considered as taxable OTT services. The key word here is “currently” —maybe they will be taxed soon, who knows?
To pay the OTT tax, you will need to use the mobile wallet and not Airtime. This is because Airtime already has its own set of TAX (VAT and EXCISE).
Charging the OTT excise duty separately from the data bundle enables the consumer to decide which days they would like to access the OTT services.
The good news is that you don’t need to be registered with URA to pay the OTT tax. You can choose to pay daily, weekly or monthly by using the official USSD codes. I know you might be Googling how to avoid paying the Social Media tax. However, please note that most of those measures may not work .
