, Anthony Kwasi Sarpong, has announced two major interventions that he says will reshape Ghana’s tax landscape — modified taxation for small businesses and digital surveillance of online transactions.){kind=link}
Commissioner-General of the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA), Anthony Kwasi Sarpong, has announced two major interventions that he says will reshape Ghana’s tax landscape — modified taxation for small businesses and digital surveillance of online transactions.
Speaking on Joy News’ PM Express Business Edition on Thursday, August 21, Mr. Sarpong described the measures as “game changers” in government’s efforts to stabilise revenue mobilisation despite recent economic challenges.
He explained that revenue performance in the first half of the year was affected by exchange rate movements, which reduced the cedi value of duties and taxes paid in foreign currency.
“If you look at the duties at the port, they are denominated in foreign currency, mostly in USD. Once the exchange rate dropped from 15 to about 10.5, that’s a 30% sharp drop in cedi terms. So obviously, in the space of three months, what was to come in dropped by 30%,” he noted.
Despite this setback, Mr. Sarpong expressed optimism that imports and corporate tax flows would recover in the second half of the year.
The GRA boss said structural reforms were key to sustainable revenue collection, with the first being the introduction of a modified taxation system targeting Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs).
“We are introducing within a month what we call the modified taxation, to define at a minimum base taxes that certain categories of businesses will pay,” he revealed.
Providing an example, he said:
“If your business turnover is GH¢200,000 a year, we are saying just pay 3% of that. That probably works out to GH¢5,000 or GH¢3,000 for the whole year. That is all that you have to pay as a small or medium enterprise.”
Mr. Sarpong added that over five million small businesses operate in Ghana, and bringing just two million of them into the tax net could yield about GH¢10 billion in revenue annually.
To make compliance easier, GRA will roll out a dedicated mobile app to allow businesses to register and pay taxes without leaving their work environments. A nationwide tax education campaign is also expected to launch next month.
The second major reform, he said, is the deployment of digital tools to monitor e-commerce and digital services.
“Data and technology are the way to go to make sure that we, as GRA, are ahead of the curve. Today, many young people do business and commerce online, and this is the future of the taxpayer,” he stressed.
By the end of the year, GRA will introduce technology to track online transactions at the point of payment.
“We are introducing a digital technology such that transactions that are taking place online, we have visibility of it. We are able to see the value of transactions taking place, and also importantly, detect the tax component at the point of payment,” he said.