Tax expert with PricewaterhouseCoopers, Abeiku Gyan-Quansah, has urged Parliament to pass a Tax Exemptions Bill laid before the house in 2019.
Addressing participants at the recent Graphic Business/Stanbic Bank forum in Accra, Gyan-Quansah said the country has been slow in dealing with the Exemption Bill despite its revenue loss concerns.
Although there were moves to streamline the tax exemptions regime in 2019, the exemption bill before Parliament has not been passed. Hence Abeiku Gyan-Quansah has questioned the urgency in getting the tax bill passed.
“The President himself identified tax exemptions as one of his headaches. I refer specifically to his speech at the 2019 state of the nation address. Parliament requested the public to give a response in March-April last year and we are still having this conversation in February 2020.”
“It is either the exemptions bill is passed or withdrawn. So that as a people, we are clear in our minds as to whether we want to deal with this issue. The deadline that was recorded in the IMF’s Article IV consultation report was in June 2018. So, if we are still having a conversation about exemption around this time, I don’t get it,” he said.
Data available shows that between 2010 and 2018, the total amount of tax exemptions granted by the Ghanaian government is in excess of GHS 4.6 billion. This high tax exemptions rate has been identified as one of the contributing factors to the poor domestic revenue collection.
Source: Ghanaweb
