Sefwi Wiawso GRA Still In A Rented Apartment After 34 Years In Operation

My credible checks on the Ghana Revenue Authority have revealed that, since this government agency came here in 1985, they have never been able to acquire a "single plot of land" let alone to put up a structure for their official residence. One would wonder why this is happening but there are more to this which cannot pass any test on logical reasoning. Formerly they were in a rented building adjacent libertyfm in sefwi wiawso but today as we speak, they have moved out to a different building at Sefwi Tanoso. I have been informed that, the said building was rented to them worth an amount of four hundred thousand Ghana cedis( 4billion old currency). My constraint here is the number of years the building has been rented to them. This same constraint wouldnt have come if we had had the Right to information bill where informations of such nature could be ascertained by a simple application. We seriously need a credible Right to Information Bill to be able to hold public office holders accountable on how they spend our taxes.

In this piece, I will demonstrate why this doesnt make sense in the first place. The argument here is that, the number of years they have been here and the cost of renting apartments vis a vis the cost of building an official residence for GRA cannot be the same. Credible information i have also picked suggests that, the structure they are renting now costs more than the old structure they recently vacated from. I want to draw the attention of citizens to a serious wastage of tax payers money within the Ghana Revenue Authority.

Article 41(f) of the 1992 constitution of the Republic of Ghana fortifies you and I the duty as citizens to protect and preserve public property and "expose and combat misuse and waste of public funds and property;". We have also as a country enacted the whistle blowers Act,2006(Act 720) that gives you and I the power to get whistles for ourselves and blow them any time there are reasonable suspicion(s) that, (a) there is wastage of public funds (b) there is the likelihood that, public funds would be wasted and the likes. As citizens of this country, we need to take advantage of some of these laws and then hold people accountable in respect of their " stewardship."

We need to be asking questions as to why Ghana Revenue Authority in Sefwi Wiawso mindful of the thirty four years"(34yrs)" in existence still lives in a rented apartment.? what is actually preventing them from putting up their own building which would have saved them billions of old currency in these rentals they are always paying. The likes of Ghana Audit service, Ghana Education service, ministry of food and agriculture(MOFA) have been able to put up structures as their official residence yet, Ghana Revenue authority which is a revenue generated institution cannot boast of same. Isnt this intriguing?

This is clear evidence of wastage of public funds for reasons which berefit common sense. If in the previous years, this has been swept under the carpet, this time around it wont happen. The policy of this government to double up revenue mobilzation as announced by the finance minister in the 2018 and 2019 budget cannot be achieved if the little revenue we are getting from the toils of our hard-working Ghanaians are spent in a manner that goes beyond misuse of public funds in this regard.

Under the regime of compulsory Tax identification as a requirement for business transactions in this country, we need to pay attention on how our taxes are being used. I am therefore by this piece , challenging the Ghana Revenue Authority to publicly debunk my assertion if what i am putting across is a fallacy. Let me pause here and save my energy for more fireworks in the coming days.

# I am a citizen not a spectator#
Dawda Eric(Equity)
Citizen Vigilance for Justice
14th December,2018
[email protected]