Egypt's official independent tax workers unions announced they will stage a sit-in on Sunday in front of the offices of the Ministry of Finance to demand higher salaries. The announcement comes after the ministry collected an additional EGP 143bn in taxes over the last several months compared to the same time during the previous year, an amount which has been placed into the State Treasury in order to help address Egypt's economic crisis. Tala'at Abdel Monem, president of the Association of Taxation and Finance, said that the number of employees working in Egypt's tax sector totalled 52,000, all of whom deserve pay increases. The association's demands included increasing monthly incentives by 400%, in addition to increasing work allowances to EGP 200 per month. He added that Tax Authority employees had made great strides and exerted great efforts to collect these sums from Egypt's various public and private sector companies, saying that they had not received any acknowledgement from the government for doing so. For this reason, he said, employees planned on holding a sit-in outside the offices of the Finance Ministry on Sunday if their demands were not met.
