GH¢1.2 Billion Budget For Ghana Revenue Authority Approved

The Parliament of Ghana has approved an amount of about 1.2 billion cedis for the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA) for the 2019 financial year.

According to the Finance Committee of Parliament, the amount is necessary to help the GRA with its pursuit of registration and issuance of Taxpayer Identification Numbers [TIN] as well as other means the authority is using to ensure efficient tax collection.

Total tax revenue projected for the year 2019 is over 45 billion cedis as against the 2018 revised budget of 38 billion cedis.

In an interview with Citi Business News, Chairman of the Finance Committee of Parliament, Mark Assibey Yeboah explained that the revenue allocated to the GRA was also dependent on how much tax they were able to collect for the year to serve as an incentive for the authority.

“So the law says that not exceeding three percent will be allocated to GRA , so for last year they got 2.44 percent of the taxes , for 2019 the government has agreed with them that they will get 2.66 percent of the tax revenue. So if you work the maths, 2.66 is of the projected tax revenue comes to 1.2 billion, the more revenue they get, the bigger their budget allocation is. So it's an incentive to them because we want to incentivise them to collect more taxes”, he said.

For the period January to September 2018, the GRA collected revenue amounting to an estimated 26 billion cedis as against a target of 28 billion cedis, resulting in a negative deviation of 2.22 billion cedis (-7.9%)

On the expenditure side, the Authority spent an amount of GHc 749.84 million, thus showing a positive variance of 9.96 million (1.3 %) for the same period.

Source: citibusinessnews.com/Ghana