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Where Do Ghana's Import Levies Go?

A Transparency Review of Customs Duties and Earmarked Levies on Imported Vehicles
By Yussif Mohammed, Andy Sevordzi, Rudolph Djirackor, Franklin Owusu Kwakye
29 Jul 2026
Keynotes

On a real 2023 Honda CR-V import we tracked line by line through Ghana's customs system, import duty made up only 39% of the total bill (GHS 135,009.30). The other 61% was spread across eighteen separate levies, taxes and fees, several of which most people importing a car have never heard explained.

About 82 pesewas of every cedi charged on this vehicle flows straight into central government's general account (the Consolidated Fund), through Import Duty, Import VAT, a 1% withholding tax and the Special Import Levy. Once it lands there, none of it is tied to any specific purpose.

Only around 12 cedis of every 100 collected are earmarked for the two funds people most associate with these charges, the National Health Insurance Fund (5.92%) and GETFund (5.91%), even though health and education levies are the ones most visibly named on the receipt.

Being earmarked in law does not guarantee the money arrives in full. Ghana's Finance Minister told the March 2025 National Economic Dialogue that less than 60% of the NHIS budget was going toward claims payments, blaming the diversion of resources to non-core activities.

Every single charge on this invoice, whether it is a national tax or a fee meant for a regional body like ECOWAS, is first collected by the same agency: the Ghana Revenue Authority's Customs Division, through its ICUMS platform. GRA is the sole collection point; it then owes each fund or agency its share under the relevant law.

Why This Matters
Anyone who has imported a vehicle into Ghana, or is planning to, has felt this list of charges directly. Car dealers, returning workers shipping home a vehicle, and everyday buyers who eventually absorb these costs in the price of a used car all have a stake in understanding what they are actually paying for, and who is holding it once GRA has collected it.

When levies are named after health, education or sanitation but the public cannot easily trace where the cedis end up after GRA collects them, it feeds a quiet but corrosive distrust of the whole tax system. Left unaddressed, that distrust makes it harder to defend any future levy, earmarked or not, and it lets genuine questions about efficiency, like the NHIS claims-payment shortfall, go unanswered for years.

Detailed Analysis

We used one detailed customs invoice as our anchor: a 2023 Honda CR-V Sport Touring, three years and three months old on arrival, valued after depreciation at a taxable base of GHS 265,437.70. Nineteen separate line items were charged against it, ranging from the well-known (Import Duty, VAT) to the obscure (a GHS 0.50 Vehicle Certification fee, a GHS 5 e-IDF fee), all collected in one transaction by GRA. Grouped by where the law ultimately sends the money once GRA has passed it on, the picture looks like this:

Follow the cedi: final destination Amount (GHS) Share of total
Central Government (Consolidated Fund) 82.38%
Import Duty 53,087.54
Import VAT 50,167.73
1% Withholding Tax on Import 2,654.38
Special Import Levy (2%) 5,308.75
Health Sector (National Health Insurance Fund) 7,988.41 5.92%
Follow the cedi: final destination Amount (GHS) Share of total
Education Sector (GETFund) 7,973.24 5.91%
Trade & Industrial Development (EXIM Levy) 1,990.78 1.47%
Regional & Continental Bodies (ECOWAS + AU) 1,858.07 1.38%
Customs / Port Operations & Service Providers 3,980.40 2.95%
TOTAL 135,009.30 100%

Figure 1. Follow the cedi: how a GHS 135,009.30 vehicle levy bill is legally divided among six destinations, after collection by GRA.

The first thing that stands out is concentration. Four line items, Import Duty, Import VAT, the 1% withholding tax and the Special Import Levy, account for 82.4% of the bill, and every cedi of that goes into general government revenue with no statutory tie to any programme. That is not unusual or improper; it is simply what those four levies were designed to do. The issue is that they sit on the same invoice as levies that are explicitly earmarked, which makes it easy for an importer to assume a much larger share of their payment is funding health or education than actually is.

The second finding concerns the levies that are earmarked, and the VAT reform behind this invoice's numbers. The National Health Insurance Levy and the GETFund Levy are both backed by their own Acts of Parliament with clear statements of purpose. Since the Value Added Tax Act, 2025 (Act 1151) took effect on 1 January 2026, these two levies have been recoupled to the VAT base rather than added on top of it, which is why this invoice charges 15% VAT on GHS 334,451.50 (the vehicle's value plus duty plus the NHIL and GETFund amounts), instead of the older, cascading calculation. The change was designed to lower the effective VAT-family rate from about 21.9% to 20% and let businesses reclaim NHIL and GETFund as input tax. Strong legal design has not, however, stopped the National Health Insurance Fund from being underused for its core purpose, a gap the government itself has acknowledged and is now trying to close by uncapping the levy.

Recommendations

1. Publish a plain-language, itemized breakdown on the customs system (ICUMS) that shows, next to every charge on a vehicle's receipt, the Act of Parliament behind it, the fact that GRA collects it, and the agency that ultimately receives it. Responsible: Ghana Revenue Authority and the Ministry of Finance.

2. Hold the 2025 uncapping of the National Health Insurance Levy to its stated goal by publishing a quarterly, public claims-payment ratio for the NHIS, so citizens can see whether the 60% shortfall the Finance Minister flagged is actually closing. Responsible: National Health Insurance Authority and Ministry of Finance.

3. Release an annual, project-by-project disbursement report for GETFund revenue collected specifically from vehicle and general goods imports, so importers can see the schools, labs or scholarships their levy contributed to. Responsible: GETFund Board of Trustees and Ministry of Education.

4. Put every ICUMS-related administrative charge, the Network Charge, its VAT, Vehicle Certification and similar fees, on a public fee schedule with a stated cost basis, reviewed at fixed intervals, rather than leaving them as internal GRA arrangements. Responsible: Ghana Revenue Authority.

5. Require the Ghana Health Service to publish what its Port Health disinfection budget actually covers nationally, and how that compares with what the Disinfection Fee collects from imports, so the fee's size can be checked against real activity. Responsible: Ghana Health Service and Ministry of Health.

Methodology Snapshot

Our data source is a single, real customs duty invoice generated for a 2023 Honda CR-V import, itemizing nineteen charges and their base amounts (reproduced as Figure 2 below). We treated it as a case study and cross-checked every line item against the Act of Parliament, regulation or fee schedule that authorizes it, using GhaLII, the Ghana Revenue Authority, and agency websites, confirming along the way that GRA's Customs Division is the sole point of collection for every charge. We then classified each levy by its statutory recipient and reviewed 2025 to 2026 government budget statements, parliamentary reports and audited disclosures to assess whether the earmarked levies were being used as legally intended.

Limitations

● This is a single-invoice case study. Exact cedi amounts scale with a vehicle's value, age and fuel type, so the shares reported here will shift for different imports, though the underlying legal structure will not.

● Utilization data, such as the NHIS claims-payment share, reflects national aggregates for the whole scheme, not the specific cedis collected from this one vehicle.

● Some charges (Network Charge, Vehicle Certification, the e-IDF fee) sit on GRA or agency administrative fee schedules rather than an Act of Parliament, so their legal basis is harder to independently verify than a statutory levy.

● The GH₵1.31 billion in EXIM Bank loan disbursements for 2017 to 2022 comes from a secondary Finance

Ministry review rather than GEXIM's own audited financial statements.

● This analysis reflects rates and rules current as of the January 2026 VAT Act, 2025 (Act 1151) reform; future budgets may change individual rates or allocations.

Yussif Mohammed, Andy Sevordzi, Rudolph Djirackor, Franklin Owusu Kwakye

GILMA Research and Consulting

Sources / References

Appendix: Source Invoice

Figure 2. The itemized customs duty invoice for the 2023 Honda CR-V used as the basis for this study.

Disclaimer: "ModernGhana is not responsible for the accuracy or reliability of this report and its content."

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