A tax analyst, Abdallah Ali Nakyea, has described as outrageous, Ghana’s loss of about 1.6 billion cedis to tax exemption for the first nine months of 2015.
[contextly_sidebar id=”XFSCkobQwnAoC7J0kPC39b3mMiQyCLXK”]According to him, government should be worried about the development and implement solutions to reduce similar occurrences in 2016.
Provisional figures released by the finance ministry showed that Ghana lost about 1.6 billion cedis to tax exemptions, beyond a target of about 541 million cedis.
Ali Nakyea in an interview with Citi Business News also said the situation has contributed to an increase in Ghana’s tax expenditures.
“This follows works done by the GRA themselves together with the Ministry of Finance’s tax policy unit and the Attorney General’s office. They were estimating the tax expenditures that is, the revenue losses from tax incentives and the tax exemptions, the figure looks too high because if you look at government’s projections, they never expected it to reach such an amount,
“So the move towards it is that in the 2016 budget, government has already gone ahead to review most of these from the imports,” he said.
The GH¢1.6 billion figure recorded was also more than the total estimated tax exemptions in the revised budget for this year which was GH¢753million.
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By: Pius Amihere Eduku/citifmonline.com/Ghana