Cameroon launches push to recover more than $500 million in unpaid gold taxes

The Cameroonian government announced Saturday that beginning August 1, it will initiate a large-scale crackdown to collect over $500 million in unpaid taxes and customs duties linked to undeclared gold exports.

The Ministry of Mines, Industry and Technological Development made the announcement late Saturday, citing findings in the 2023 Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative report, which showed a wide gap between the volume of gold officially declared and the volume actually shipped out of Cameroon.

Officials said the problem is not missing gold, but missing revenue. Under Cameroonian law, taxes and customs duties on gold must be paid before export. Because some shipments went through unofficial channels, the state did not collect what it was owed.

According to the statement, the government is now pursuing recovery efforts both at home and abroad, targeting operators who avoided payments between the 2023 and 2025 fiscal years.

The ministry identified two main groups for action: 51 companies that carried out physical gold extraction with traditional methods but reported lower output than they produced, and 33 newly discovered sites using newer extraction systems whose production has never been declared or taxed.

"These adjustments will allow the state to recover, in the very short term, at least 300 billion CFA francs (about $524 million)," the ministry said. "That would offset the revenue losses of about 165 billion CFA francs (about $288 million) highlighted in the 2023 EITI report."

Alongside the recovery drive, authorities plan to roll out a new system to track gold production in real time, with the goal of preventing future revenue leaks, the statement said.

The announcement comes just days after the government said it expects revenue from new mining projects and a revamped gold sector to top 1 trillion CFA francs (about $1.75 billion) in the near term. If that happens, mining would overtake oil as Cameroon's largest source of state revenue.