The Ghana Revenue Authority, GRA, has said it will leverage on technology to boost efficiency at its new Tax Audit and Quality Assurance Unit.
The GRA in collaboration with the Ministry of Finance have jointly inaugurated a new Tax Audit and Quality Assurance Unit to ensure a centralized audit planning process and guarantee quality auditing.
Commissioner General of the GRA, Reverend Ammishaddai Owusu-Amoah, is hopeful deploying the right technology will help them tax appropriately and generate the right revenue for government.
“One of the smaller units within that department is what we call the data mining and digital unit. In this particular unit we will have the data for our domestic tax, all the data for our customs side, we will have data linked to other government departments like DVLA and SSNIT and lands commission evaluation and all that. So we will use all these multiple data to accomplish what we call Data mining.”
“For example, if you own a Bentley and you are paying for instance Ghc1, 000 as your tax on monthly basis, the data man will be able to match it and know that is the right tax to pay. So basically there are a lot of such analysis and artificial intelligence and we have actually recruited someone with that specialty in that area to do the data matching and data analysis and using artificial intelligence to be able to tax the tax payer” he explained.
The Finance Minister, Ken Ofori-Atta, who inaugurated the unit said it will ensure efficiency in tax collection.
“Some auditors in charge of auditing jobs sometimes get away with unprofessional practices because no one audits their work when they are done, so many wrongs are buried upon the issuance of their reports never to be resurrected again, and we want to change that. So there should be an audit to audit the Auditor concept. Once they know their work may be reviewed, they will not compromise on the integrity of their work” the Minister explained.
