Some of the participants and officials in a group photograph
The Ghana Revenue
Authority (GRA) says it is developing an e-payment platform that will enable
taxpayers in the informal sector to pay their taxes via mobile money.
It also says it will introduce
electronic point of sales devices to help capture Value Added Tax (VAT)
transactions on a real time basis.
Commissioner General of
GRA, Emmanuel Kofi Nti, disclosed this over the weekend in Koforidua at the
opening of a two-day workshop sponsored by his outfit for members of the
Private Newspaper Publishers Association of Ghana (PRINPAG) on the theme:
“Brining the informal sector into the tax net – the role of the media”.
In April this year, he
said the GRA launched its prosecution policy to alert tax defaulters that the
GRA did not only bark but could also ‘bite hard’.
Mr. Nti added that
President Akufo-Addo’s vision of a Ghana beyond aid would fail to materialise
if citizens continued to evade the payment of taxes.
He challenged members of
PRINPAG to honour their tax obligations in order to have the moral fortitude to
be able to report on tax issues.
“Beginning Tuesday, I
expect you to rush to the MTOs or STOs to settle your outstanding and current
liabilities to the full …” he appealed.
In an address, Eastern
Regional Minister Eric Kwakye Darfour said the 80 per cent of the Ghanaian
workforce who were in the informal sector had a great potential for necessary
domestic revenue mobilisation and reducing the huge budget deficit.
“Studies have established
that the factors that make the informal sector hard to tax were very high in
Ghana as a result of the predominance of cash transactions, poor record
keeping, high illiteracy rate, little or no barriers to entry, lack of laid-down
procedures, ignorance of tax laws and the peripatetic nature of the
informal sector in Ghana,” he stated,
adding that the effective and efficient
imposition of income tax on the informal sector held the great prospect of
closing the yawning gap in domestic
revenue generation.
Andrew Edwin Arthur,
President of PRINPAG, touched on the need for media training institutions to incorporate
specialised reporting in their curricula so student journalists could do better
reports on the varied sectors of the economy including agriculture, banking,
the road sector and employment, just to mention a few.
He also mentioned that
collaboration and co-ordination between personnel of the Customs Division of
the GRA and other security agencies was very crucial…
“One other factor that affects revenue
mobilisation and which discourages
people from volunteering information that could lead to the arrest of tax
evaders is the issue of the confidentiality and the protection of
whistleblowers, which is sometimes compromised, thereby exposing whistleblowers
to the dangers of attacks and insults,” he stressed.
Furthermore, the PRINPAG president complained that the perceived misapplication and mismanagement of public revenue demoralises taxpayers to honour tax obligations, particularly due to the flamboyant lifestyles of some politicians.
By Samuel Boadi
