Government should focus on efficient tax measures to achieve 2022 revenue target
Government has been charged to focus heavily on efficient tax measures in order to achieve the 2022 revenue target.
This comes at the back of concerns that this year’s revenue will suffer following the indefinite suspension of the reversal of the benchmark value policy on some imported items.
Government is targeting about ¢100 billion in taxes and grants for 2022, which projects a 42.9% revenue increment.
The projected 42.9% revenue increment is expected to be achieved by government through the introduction of the electronic transaction levy, the 15% increment in government services, reintroduction of the 3% Flat Levy, property rates and government’s new resolve to pass the tax exemptions bill in 2022 to check revenue leakages as the immediate steps taken by government to increase revenues.
At the moment, Ghana’s public debt is unsustainable and pegged at 77.8 percent of Gross Domestic Product (Ghs 341.8 billion) and further projected to continue on an elevated path.
Economist and Director of the Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research (ISSER), Professor Peter Quartey, has stated that it is uncessary for government to increase tax rates and introduce new taxes to drive revenue mobilization.
According to him, the government should be focused on ensuring efficiency in tax collection rather than increasing tax rates.
“If you look at the 2022 budget, you’ll see a lot of new policies to revive revenue mobilization in terms of ensuring tax efficiency using digitalization to rake in more tax revenue. We have said this from time to time, but we don’t implement them like we should. I don’t think we should introduce new taxes. I don’t think we should increase the tax rate,” he said.
Professor Quartey further explained that, the current mode of tax collection in the country is counter-productive and offers so many avenues for corruption and leakages in the system.
He noted that if the government is really interested in generating more revenue it should find an efficient solution to tax collection.
“If we’re able to take out the middleman, in other words, if we’re able to ensure that people pay straight into government chest like it’s being done through the GRA portal, and many others, we’ll reduce a lot of the corruption, the leakages in the system. Ensuring tax efficiency is one of the surest ways that government can raise revenue,” he said.
Professor Quartey added that the government has been overly concentrated on taxes as a source of revenue and it has overlooked other avenues of revenue mobilization internally.
According to him, other avenues of revenue mobilization that is non-tax revenues have the potential to meet the revenue demands of the government and thus should be looked into.
“We have also not done so well with non-tax revenue. It’s always raising taxes here and there, but there are non-tax revenue like property rates for instance. We’ve allowed the local authorities, the local government or district assemblies to mobilise this resource.
“I don’t think they have been efficient in mobilizing this resource. Perhaps the Central government should come in, either through digitalisation or other more efficient ways to ensure that we mobilise property rates and many other non-tax revenues.
“There are lots of opportunities out there for revenue mobilization. Government has SOEs that should be profit making but they’re not. A lot of them rather depend on government,” he said.
