Digital Addressing System To Enhance Tax Collection

A Technical Director to the Commissioner General of the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA), Henry Yentumi, has said the digital property addressing system being rolled out by government will help enhance tax collection in the country.

According to him, the digital system will help in location identification, and also doubles as a key element of their strategy to compliance in the country.

“One of the biggest issues we are facing is identifying hawkers on the street and also identifying people in the informal sector. So the digital addressing system with help us identify them”, he stressed.

Mr. Yentumi made this statement at a stakeholder engagement forum organized by GRA in Accra.

Mr. Henry Yentumi hinted, in the mid-year review presented by the IMF, revenue collection performance was Ghc3 billion below the target.

“Since June we just had a third quarter review completed by the IMF, and we are just about six to eight hundred million below target. Now this is in respect of a tax collection of the year of 35 to 40% and we are just about meeting that target”, he stressed.

Statistics

According to statistics presented to the media, there are about 1.2 million taxpayers registered with the GRA, of which 1 million are in the formal sector.

There are also 200,000 in the informal sector which contributes 1% to the total tax revenue.

National Tax Campaign

The theme for the four weeks nationwide campaign on voluntary tax compliance is dubbed #OurTaxesOurFuture.

GRA intends to raise awareness of the benefits of taxation, improve voluntary compliance, educate the general public on their tax, and cause positive change in attitudes and beliefs.

The media will play a pivotal role the campaign through dissemination of information to the population.

They will also flood social media with educative information, jingles, and theme songs, all intended to create maximum awareness.

By: Emmanuel Yeboah Britwum