GRA cautions recalcitrant taxpayers

The Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA) has cautioned recalcitrant taxpayers to urgently settle all tax obligations as it is an infringement of the country’s tax laws.

According to the Authority a tax audit has revealed that taxpaying companies are constantly defaulting their payment obligation, and this is a serious offence against the tax laws.

The GRA has been charged to collect GH¢21.98 billion for 2015 fiscal year. “We want to send out notices to all taxpayers to quickly rush to the various GRA offices to file their Value Added Tax invoices, settle their tax returns and register their businesses, because we have a list of all the delinquent taxpayers and we are coming up after them,” Mr. Theophilus Gaskin, Chief Revenue Officer, Director of Task Force of the GRA said this in Accra.

He was speaking at a distress action embarked on by the task force against some five delinquent companies, which together owed the Authority some GH¢4.5 million in taxes since 2008.

The taskforce was to enforce compliance with tax laws and to get defaulting and potential taxpayers to honour their tax obligations.

The task force would be probing the issuance of Value Added Tax and National Health Insurance Levy (VAT/NHIL), invoices by businesses, the filing of VAT/NHIL, Pay as You Earn, returns by the due dates, and the payment of any outstanding tax liabilities owed the GRA, among other things.

Mr. Gaskin explained that the taskforce which has the mandate to strengthen the tax collection machinery of the GRA by ensuring full compliance with the provision of the tax laws and to shore up tax revenue.

“The mandated period for the task force end on December, so we are encouraging all tax payers to rush to our office to pay, register their business if they have not done that, file their VAT returns if they have not done so, they should pay up all ‘Pay As You Earn’ tax. 

‘This is one of the most effective ways of collecting taxes, we don’t do it all year round but periodically and when we do you see most companies thronging to our offices to pay their taxes.

“Our target is to ensure that GRA’s revenue collection target is achieved and even exceeded. We gave the recalcitrant tax payers prior notification, and in some cases the debt of some of the companies has been in our books since 2010."

The action of the GRA’s special taskforce which was recently launched had visited 324 delinquent tax payers and retrieved about GH¢12.4 million on the spot collection within two weeks of operation.

The Authority has instituted a 40-member Special Taskforce for revenue mobilization with the core responsibility of enforcing tax payment compliance with all tax obligations.

The taskforce will be working in partnership with the Compliance, Enforcement and Debt Management Unit of the Authority and is targeted at enabling the GRA to attain its goal of generating enough revenue for the state, and also find ways of dealing with debtors that have long been on the Authority’s books.