General News of Saturday, 21 January 2017
Source: atinkaonline.com
2017-01-21
Yaw Osafo Marfo , Senior Minister-designate
Senior Minister Nominee, Yaw Osafo Marfo, has described some taxes as nuisance.
According to him, these taxes serve as a hindrance to production and more so the efforts of even doing the collection is not worth it.
He made this known when he appeared before the Vetting Committee of Parliament on Friday.
Osafo Marfo who was the first to appear before the committee was emphatic that his government is not saying that it will not collect taxes but will review all taxes that hinder production.
He said, “One of such taxes is the Financial Sector VAT tax of 17.5%. You are taxing banks with their profit as you tax all the other companies. Financial Sector Transaction Act deals with my operations within the bank what would have been COT and related issues. To come out with figures after the operation itself is a problem to the banks and that is what you want to tax the 17.5%?”
“To me, it is a nuisance tax. Now we talking about corporate tax and we should be talking of having a bigger net to collect from rather than knowing that a few people no matter what you do they will pay and you keep on increasing the taxes and this is what Ghana has been for some time”
The former Minister of Finance and Economic Planning restated the NPP government decision to cut corporate tax from 25% to 20%.
“What is withholding tax? It is a lazy way of taxing. Somebody is taxed in advance of an operation and is allowed to take it at the end. What does it do.
You are taking people’s capital and it is 5-10%. Such taxes should be looked at. We looking at production and making this whole thing friendly to businesses. Anytime we realize a tax creates a hindrance to businesses, we are going to look at it.”
He hinted that the NPP government’s first budget which will be in early March and will review all these taxes.
“We did mention in our manifesto and we are going to keep to our promise. We have already met three times on it and we are looking at the relevant figures to inform our budget”
