Tax Analyst, William Demitia has impressed on government to expand the Tax Identification Number (TIN) policy to include areas such as mobile money transactions rather than introduce new tax policies.
This follows a recent indication by the Finance Minister, Ken Ofori Atta that government will in its midyear budget review introduce some new tax policies as part of measures to shore up the country’s domestic revenue mobilization.
Though it is still unclear whether or not the new policies will result in the introduction of new taxes, Mr. Demitia maintains that government has enough tax policies to meet the revenue needs of the country.
Mr. Demitia said government should consider making the use of TIN a requirement for mobile money transactions.
“What about going to mobile money registration platforms and then requiring that they will also be used as a means of registration then we are pushing it gradually, and we are moving away from
the formal banking sector to the informal sector where they deal a lot with mobile money”.
In an interview with Citi Business News, Mr. Demitia said government should focus on expanding the use of the TIN as well as tracking revenue from tax payers rather than introduce new policies.
“For me it’s a question of what we have in our laws, my problem with introducing new policies is that, it comes with its own challenge”.
He added that government should also work to ensure a high level of compliance in filing taxes.
“For the tax policies, we already have, what is the compliance level. If the compliance level is not really high, then we must take steps to make sure that what we have in our books are being complied with. And like I said we can use the mobile money platform”.
“And then in doing that, we are able to get to everybody to at least have an identification number for that purpose”, he said.
This year the GRA has a revenue target of 39.8 billion Ghana cedis even after government recently abolished 64 taxes to that number.