Over the years, the authority has responded immensely to it corporate social responsibilities including providing support to learning institutions by helping them with transportation and other form of assistance.
Due to the huge collections of revenue, many Sierra Leoneans are expecting staff of this authority to operate in decent buildings equipped with a lot of facilities especially for it regional offices.
The Northern Regional office of the national revenue authority operates at No. 3 Station Road in Makeni, and the structure was a stamping ground for many clients, including business people within Makeni and beyond.
For almost a year ago, regular clients of this authority are faced with many challenges in locating the new location, including delays in processing clients’ documents among others.
Investigations conducted by this medium revealed that the regional office of national revenue authority (NRA) has been in refurbishment for almost a year.
Regular checks at the purported renovation site have proven that there is no work in progress as there was no single worker around to attend to clients.
The process according to members of the public is long overdue owing to the relevant services rendered by this all important institution to clients.
What is raising more eye brows in the refurbishment exercise is the failure of top officials of the authority to name the contracting firm.
African Young Voices Newspaper has on several occasions visited the authority’s at the current location in the northern district headquarter town of Makeni to ascertain why the delay in the completion of the refurbishment project.
The present regional office of authority in Makeni is located in an upstairs building at Station Road of which the lower flat is used for commercial purposes, and this unusual location is making business transactions to become boring for customers of the authority.
Descriptively, the temporal regional office of the national revenue authority operates in a single parlor and all the authority regional staff in Makeni including the heads are using one single room to carry out their day to day operations.
When this press contacted the head of authority’s regional office in Makeni, Yakuba Conteh disclosed that he knew nothing about the contract and the contractors.
He angrily stated that whosoever wanted to know about the very contract relating to rehabilitation of the authority branch in Makeni, should traveled to Freetown for enquiry, and that he was not in the capacity to comment on the contract.
The million dollar questions the public continued to pose is that how can a head of such a sensitive and indispensable institution in governance is unacquainted with a contract and contractors hired to renovate their regional offices.
There are also wide spread speculations that the contract might have been awarded to the contractor through the back door by breaching procurement procedures, thus making Conteh to become jittery over the whole issue.
If due procedures were followed in awarding the contract, officials of authority would not have been nervous in naming the contractors, and at the same time the entire process would have been completed before now.
Several clients this press contacted urged the mask faced contractors to fast track the renovation exercise for the good of the institution and country as whole.
