URA sent you a letter? Here's exactly what to do (and not do)

A letter from the Uganda Revenue Authority does something to the body — most people describe the same cold drop in the stomach. Take a breath. In our experience, the letter is almost never as bad as the fear, and the actions of the next 72 hours determine most of what follows.

First: identify what you're actually holding

URA letters fall into a few families, and they are not equally urgent:

• Reminder / demand for returns — you have unfiled returns. Annoying, cheap to fix, and the best possible version of a URA letter.
• Estimated assessment — URA has decided what you owe, on their assumptions, because you didn't file. The figure is usually inflated — and challengeable, on a deadline.
• Audit / records request — URA wants documents. This is the opening move of a structured process; how you respond shapes all of it.
• Agency notice / enforcement — URA is collecting: from your bank, your tenants, your debtors. This one is genuinely urgent — hours matter, not days.

The three moves that help

1. Find the deadline. Somewhere in the letter is a date — to respond, object or comply. Statutory deadlines are unforgiving: a wrong assessment you don't challenge in time becomes a final one you owe. Circle it.
2. Gather, don't send. Collect everything relevant — returns, receipts, bank statements, the letter itself. But don't send anything to URA yet. Unmanaged disclosure creates problems that managed disclosure avoids.
3. Get the letter read professionally — fast. A licensed tax agent can usually tell you within a day what the letter really means, what your exposure honestly looks like, and what the response strategy should be. (We do this same-day, and the first look is free.)

The three moves that hurt

1. Ignoring it. Silence converts hypotheses into assessments, assessments into final debts, and final debts into agency notices on your bank account. Every stage of ignoring is more expensive than the one before.
2. Calling URA in a panic and improvising. Everything you say can shape the file. Taxpayers regularly volunteer problems nobody was asking about, or commit to positions their own records contradict.
3. Paying an estimated assessment just to make it stop. Estimates are routinely far above the true liability. Filing correct figures and objecting — inside the deadline — is very often dramatically cheaper.

Why letters are arriving more often

URA's data game has changed: land registry records, EFRIS invoices, bank data and third-party returns are matched systematically. Landlords, professionals and traders who were invisible for years are surfacing in batches. If your letter feels like it came out of nowhere, that's the machinery — and it also means guessing "how they found you" is pointless. What matters is the response.

One genuinely good piece of news

If your problem includes old arrears: the law currently waives interest and penalties on principal tax that was outstanding at 30 June 2025 — provided the principal is paid by 30 June 2027. For many people holding scary letters, the real, negotiated number ends up a fraction of the one printed on the page.

Not sure where you stand? Let's find out — before URA does it for you.