By Issah Mohammed/John Awayevu
Accra, Oct 4, GNA – Dr Bishop Akolgo, a United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) National Consultant on Illicit Financial Flows (IFFS), says the ability of Government to justify why citizens need to pay taxes is crucial for tax compliance.
He observed that most citizens had ‘resigned from the State’ thus paying taxes to themselves due to non-assurance on how the State was utilising resources.
“Look at the size of the shadow economy and the size of your informal sector, and that should tell you that many of us have resigned from the State.
“When we have confidence that the State is deploying the resources effectively as the Koreans and the Taiwanese have done in supporting their private sector by nurturing them to grow the economy…then you have enough confidence in the system that citizens would walk to the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA) to pay tax without being prompted,” he said.
Dr Akologo made the remarks at a Public Forum on the topic, “Improving Domestic Resource Mobilisation and Combating Illicit Financial Flows in Ghana: The Role of the Media and Other Stakeholders”.
The event was organised by the Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA) with the support of OXFAM Ghana.
He said for a country going through a transition from a pre capitalist, pre-industrial society towards a dynamic market economy, it was important for the government to understand that citizens determined how to balance benefits and burden in society.
He called for the empowering of government as a facilitator of a pre-capitalist economy that would be nurtured through the private sector.
“I was hoping that the crisis we are going through would give us the chance to reflect and say we need a social transformation agenda because this thing about fighting corruption and the democracy that donors are pushing on us is not the most important agenda,” he said.
Speaking on behalf of the Commissioner General, Rev. Dr. Ammishaddai Owusu-Amoah, the Special Technical Advisor to the Commissioner General, Mr Dominic Naab, observed that revenue collection in Ghana had been a challenging task.
The situation, he said, was attributable to the largely informal sector of the economy, tax evasion, money laundering, and illicit financial flows, among others.
“More often than not, there is a push back when new tax policies are introduced for the collective good and this is also as a result of the lack of understanding of the policy and misinformation,” he said.
As part of initiatives to improve its revenue mobilisation efforts, he said the Authority had initiated award schemes to reward tax evasion investigations and stories that would lead to the recovery of funds.
Mr Winiful George Swanzy, Director, Revenue Policy Division, said there was the need to improve strategy towards combating illegal and illicit flows that deprived the country of the needed revenue for development.
He noted that as one of the objectives of the Post COVID-19 Programme for economic growth, the government had developed a medium-term revenue strategy, a high-level roadmap of reforms that served as a guide in tax policy formulation and administration.
“Be assured that this strategy document will not only help improve tax to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) target but will also help in promoting tax certainty and predictability,” he said.
He said the media had a role of reaching out to taxpayers and improving tax compliance by influencing public opinion on taxes.
GNA