The Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA) is the revenue arm of government
• Close to 60,000 professionals, businesses have been found to be evading taxes
•This comes after the GRA conducted an exercise to ascertain the figures
• Already, Ghana is lagging is behind in its revenue mobilisation efforts
Finance Minister, Ken Ofori-Atta has disclosed that an exercise to ascertain tax defaulters by the Ghana Revenue Authority earlier showed that about 60,000 businesses were operating without paying taxes.
The categories of persons who were evading taxes included lawyers, doctors and other professionals.
In an interaction with Asaase Radio monitored by GhanaWeb, Ken Ofori-Atta said, “so, once upon a time, we had 5.5 million Tax Identification Numbers [TINs] … which most of us try to dodge…Now today, because of the National ID, GRA has 15.5 million TINs. Now that’s triple.”
“And then we went through the exercise to sort of titrate to see what we’ve got, and we got about 60,000 businesspeople who were not paying taxes,” he revealed.
“Some 5,000 or 6,000 lawyers are not. Some doctors [are not paying income tax] …so you begin to see all of these professionals, all of us on social media ranting against the government and [realise] that most of these people are not even paying taxes,” the finance minister stressed.
Though there is still work to be in generating more revenue, Ken Ofori-Atta said the GRA is making changes to its structure in order to ensure these efforts yield results.
“So, if you look at the multiplier effect of that… we are currently at about 14% of revenue-to-GDP ratio and our peers are 18% to 21%,” he pointed.