Cameroon Tells High Earners: File Your Income Tax or Be Named

By Damian Maabo, with field reporting by Clarice Arrey Tarkang and Hugues Djon.

Cameroon's tax administration has registered more than 1.4 million annual personal income tax returns, but it expects close to 3 million, and it is now using the threat of public exposure to close the gap. After two deadlines, 31 July and 30 August 2026, the Minister of Finance, Louis-Paul Motaze, granted a final seven days of leniency, with a cut-off at midnight on Monday 14 September 2026. The message to people with high incomes was blunt: file, or be named.

From a slow start to a real uptake

Personal income tax filing is still a young habit for many Cameroonians, and the tax administration says it has spent years walking people through it. John Kinyuy, the IT director of the Directorate General of Taxation, described the change in one comparison: institutions that once needed hand-holding now say they already know how to go about it.

“Last year we didn't have 1.4 million returns as we're having this year. So there is an uptake.”

— John Kinyuy, IT Director, Directorate General of Taxation

The number is real progress. It is also a reminder of how large the untapped group still is: the administration expects close to 3 million declarations for this exercise, which means roughly half of the expected filers had not yet come forward at that stage of the campaign.

What happens to those who do not file

The ministry's press release says the deadline for the 2025 fiscal year had been set for 31 July 2026 and was then pushed to 30 August. It then added a final seven days, counted from publication of the notice. Officials say people with high net worth were told in writing what they risk.

Kinyuy cited the Manual of Tax Procedures: for those who have not filed on time and after a formal reminder, a fine of 100,000 FCFA is generated automatically by the system. Beyond that, the administration plans to publish the list of defaulters, which he described with the English expression the tax world uses: name and shame.

Why this matters for the budget

Cameroon's public finances rely heavily on a narrow group of formal taxpayers, a point economists keep making. We covered that argument in our article on where Cameroon's public money leaks. Getting several million people, many of them salaried and already visible to the state, into an online filing habit is one of the cheapest ways to widen the base without raising a single rate.

It also connects to the other revenue-side measures in this round-up: the work with the World Bank on tracking financial assets (the World Bank work on tracking financial assets) and the audit of the state payroll (the state payroll audit). Each one tries to answer the same question: who is on the books, and who is not?

A revenue problem bigger than one campaign

The filing drive lands at a difficult moment for public revenue. In its 2026 review of Cameroon, the IMF put non-oil revenue at 12.3% of GDP in 2025, down from 13.2% in 2024. It said weak non-oil revenue and overruns on current spending had produced a non-oil primary deficit of 2.6% of GDP, against a budget target of 1.4%. Its Executive Directors called for continued efforts to strengthen revenue mobilisation.

Against the size of the economy, the sums in this campaign are still small. The 10 billion FCFA collected so far is about 0.03% of the 34,445 billion FCFA of 2025 GDP estimated by the IMF. Our reading is that the value of the exercise lies less in that first payment than in building a record of who earns what, which the state can use year after year.

The calendar is also new. According to PwC, the Finance Act for 2025 replaced the single 30 June filing date for non-professional taxpayers with three deadlines that depend on the taxpayer's category. Bloomberg Tax reported that the 31 July date applied to high-net-worth individuals and to public and parastatal employees, the same groups now being warned.

What to watch next

Two things will show whether the push works. The first is the final count of returns once the grace period has run out. The second is whether the list of defaulters is actually published and what share of the 100,000 FCFA fines is collected. Officials also say that, apart from the occasional internet connection problem, there are few setbacks to complain about with the online system.

Sources and further reading: Cameroon Directorate General of Taxation, Ministry of Finance, IMF: 2026 Article IV consultation with Cameroon, PwC: Cameroon individual tax summary, Bloomberg Tax. Field reporting and interviews: Clarice Arrey Tarkang and Hugues Djon. Figures come from the tax administration and the Ministry of Finance; wider context comes from the IMF, PwC and Bloomberg Tax. Updated 7 November 2026.

English · Français · Deutsch · Türkçe · Русский · 中文 · العربية