Commissioner-General of the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA), Anthony Kwasi Sarpong, says Ghana’s tax future will be transformed by two fundamental interventions, modified taxation for small businesses and digital surveillance of online transactions.
Speaking on Joy News’ PM Express Business Edition on Thursday, August 21, he described both measures as “game changers” in government’s effort to stabilise revenue mobilisation despite economic headwinds.
He explained that revenue performance in the first half of the year was hit by exchange rate movements that sharply reduced the cedi values of duties and taxes paid in dollars.
“If you look at the duties at the port, they are denominated in foreign currency, mostly in USD. And therefore, once the exchange rate, which is overall good for the economy, dropped from 15 to about 10.5, that’s a 30% sharp drop in cedi terms. So obviously, in a split of three months, what is to come in, you drop it by 30%,” he said.
Despite this setback, he said confidence remains high that imports and corporate tax flows will recover in the second half.
But beyond short-term adjustments, he insisted that structural reforms are the real drivers of sustainable collections.
“One of those fundamental measures we’re talking about here is what we call the modified taxation. We’ve talked about expanding the tax base, particularly for the Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises.
“We are introducing within a month what we call the modified taxation, one to define at a minimum base taxes that certain categories of businesses will pay.”
Mr. Sarpong gave a practical example.
“For example, if you are doing a business and your turnover is 200,000 a year, we are saying just pay 3% of that. That probably works out to 5000 or 3000 the whole year. That is all that you have to pay as a small, medium enterprise.”
He added that GRA will deploy a dedicated mobile app to make registration and payment seamless so businesses can comply without leaving their operating environments.
He noted the potential impact of this shift on revenue.
“It is estimated that we have over 5 million such businesses in Ghana. But potentially, let’s take the assumption that we’re raking 2 million of such businesses to the tax net.
“If on average, these businesses are paying 5000 a year, that is 10 billion. That translates to 1 billion a year with potential to grow.”
He said alongside modified taxation, a nationwide tax education campaign will begin next month to tackle the problem of civic awareness.
“We’ve been doing a lot of tax education over the years, but we have come to the point where we realise that still many Ghanaians are not fully aware of their civic responsibilities insofar as contributing a bit of their income for taxation.
“And therefore, by next month, we are launching nationwide tax education that will be continuous, not only as GRA but with other stakeholders.”
Turning to technology, Mr. Sarpong stressed that the digital economy cannot remain outside the tax net.
“Data and technology are the way to go to make sure that we, as GRA, are ahead of the curve. So today we have the digital economy where many of the young people do business, commerce and means of transportation are through Uber or Bolt, they buy online. So this is the future of the taxpayer, and we must be future-ready now and also into the future.”
He confirmed that before the end of the year, GRA will roll out digital surveillance tools to capture 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 amount of value of transactions taking place, and also importantly, detect the tax component at the point of payment.
“This is going to be a game changer for both institutions that are outside Ghana but trading in Ghana, and for institutions that are here.”