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<\/div>\nWorld Bank worries about Ghana’s tax exemptions<\/b><\/p>\n
Ghana should cut down its expenditure – Pierre Frank Laporte<\/p>\n
World Bank gave Ghana US$430 million to fight COVID-19 <\/p>\n
Pierre Frank Laporte, the World Bank Country Director, has said, one of Ghana\u2019s biggest problems is that, the country gives too many tax exemptions. <\/p>\n
According to him, the only way the country can fix its debt to GDP ratio is not just by cutting expenditure, but by increasing revenue.<\/p>\n
He told Joy News\u2019 \u2018PM Express\u2019 show that, Ghana would first have to shirk some of its tax practices, particularly tax exemptions while increasing efficiency in tax collection.<\/p>\n
He explained that the tax exemptions are for instance to attract more foreign investors into the country, but the empirical evidence has proven that too many tax exemptions have failed to provide the desired results.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, you talked about efficiency, that\u2019s one thing, to make sure that everybody pays what they should be paying. That for instance if you look at exemptions in Ghana it\u2019s a big problem. There are too many exemptions.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd this is a conversation we\u2019re having with the Ministry of Finance. Very often countries think you can give so much incentives, so much concessions, and exemptions to attract investors. But there are other ways that this can be done,\u201d Pierre Frank Laporte stated. <\/p>\n
He added, \u201cEmpirical evidence has shown that these incentives excessively, in the long run, don\u2019t work.<\/p>\n
TWI NEWS<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cVAT exemptions are given to many big investors to facilitate their entry and to launch their activities. But in many countries, either you have a quick VAT refund, it\u2019s like the investor pays his VAT and you process his refund in one month or two.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are other countries that do for instance, VAT deferment. You don\u2019t pay your VAT now, you\u2019re exempted now but down the line, the minute you start operating you\u2019ll recover the VAT. So you will not get refunded until you go and reimburse. There are many other ways of doing it and it\u2019s a different conversation.\u201d<\/p>\n Pierre Frank Laporte, however, called on the government to also adopt property taxes.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are other taxes, recently we launched the Country Economic Memorandum for Ghana and for instance property taxes is one area where many places in the world are doing it. It\u2019s a norm, it\u2019s a standard in developing world, developing economies and why can\u2019t Ghana do it?<\/p>\n \u201cAnd today things are in digital transition that can speed the collection that can make sure that you capture everyone. There are many other things that can be done…\u201d Pierre Frank Laporte stressed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" World Bank worries about Ghana’s tax exemptions Ghana should cut down its expenditure – Pierre Frank Laporte World Bank gave Ghana US$430 million to fight COVID-19 Pierre Frank Laporte, the World Bank Country Director, has said, one of Ghana\u2019s biggest problems is that, the country gives too many tax exemptions. According to him, the only […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[557,1721,1749,1792,85,463,1564,4211,784],"class_list":{"0":"post-976078","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-business","7":"tag-bank","8":"tag-country","9":"tag-director","10":"tag-exemptions","11":"tag-ghana","12":"tag-play","13":"tag-tax","14":"tag-videothere","15":"tag-world"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/976078","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=976078"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/976078\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=976078"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=976078"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=976078"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}