The Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA) has said it has put in place adequate measures to ensure that the raging novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) does not harm revenue collection and tax administration in the country. The Commissioner General of the GRA, Mr Ammisshadai Owusu-Amoah, mentioned some of the measures as the introduction of online filing of tax returns and payment of taxes, reliefs for taxpayers whose obligations were past due and the opening up of tax collection in all banks in the country.
He said the measures were meant to make tax compliance easier and also reduce the impact of the virus on the amount of revenue that the authority would mobilise this year.
He was speaking to the Daily Graphic last Thursday in Accra in an exclusive interview on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on tax administration and collection and the measures and incentives that the authority was putting in place to mitigate its effects.
Advice Mr Owusu-Amoah advised companies and individuals who had been hit hard by the pandemic to alert the authority to their predicaments.
“If you are a church, hotel or any sort of company and for anything at all you cannot pay your workers or taxes, please notify us. Let us know the situation, so that we can put it on file and work with it,” he said.
He also advised the public to take advantage of the GRA’s informants’ award scheme to notify the authority about people and institutions that are not complying with their tax obligations.
Other measures
According to him, the GRA was also devising new strategies for tax collection as a response strategy to the challenges that the COVID-19 had imposed on movement.
He said while it was obvious that the pandemic would impact negatively on some sectors of the economy, other businesses stood to benefit, although the presence of the virus meant that the GRA could not audit such firms as it usually would do.
Consequently, Mr Owusu-Amoah said, it was deploying non-traditional measures, such as virtual auditing of firms and filing of tax returns, to help ease compliance and mitigate the effect of the virus.
He said the GRA was currently working with the Office of the Vice-President to make it possible for people to file their tax returns and pay the funds online.
The filing of the returns and the payment of taxes would be done through the Ghana.gov.gh portal, an online platform that the government developed to serve as a one-stop shop for the public to access government services, including making payments to ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs).
Tax types
According to Mr Owusu-Amoah, although the migration of tax payments online was a priority project, the government decided to fast-track it this year to incentise tax payments in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.
He mentioned corporate tax, personal income tax (PIT), value added tax (VAT) — both the standard and the flat rate —, the Communications Service Tax (CST), the Ghana Education Trust Fund (GETFund) Levy, the National Health Insurance Levy, among others, as some of the tax handles that would be covered under the online tax payment initiative.
Later in the year, he said, people would also be able to pay their vehicle income tax (VIT) and tax stamp through the portal, as more tax handles came on board.
He said while the tax stamp was for micro businesses, the VIT was paid by commercial vehicles, including taxis and intra- and inter-city buses.
To help make the online payment smooth, he said, the authority would also make it possible for all banks to receive taxes directly.
Currently, only the GCB Bank and Ecobank are direct recipients of tax revenue, with the remaining banks doing so only through inter-bank transfers.
On the security of the platform, the commissioner general said the Ghana.gov.gh portal had been enhanced with standard controls and subjected to robust tests to ensure that it was safe from third-party interferences.
Taxpayer's view
A tax partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), Mr Abeku Gyan-Quansah, said in a separate interview that provisions for the collection of tax returns and tax payments on behalf of the GRA using banks had been in the tax laws since 1998, while provisions for the electronic filing of documents and tax payments were provided in the General Tax Administration Law in 2016.
He said the two processes were, however, not fully implemented, resulting in the current manual and physical process used to pay and receive taxes.
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