Ghana’s Revenue Authority has launched a new policy that seeks to tax non-residential digital companies such as Netflix, Amazon, Alibaba etc. The E-Commerce and Digital Service Registration Portal is expected to deliver 1.2 billion Ghanaian cedis to the country when fully implemented.
The GRA Commissioner Reverend Dr Ammishaddai Owusu-Amoah at the launching of the platform said it was created to ensure that all businesses operating in Ghana complied with tax obligations and that it was part of moves to enable the tax authority to reach its target of 80.3 billion cedis this year. According to him, the portal was developed with a compliant tool that makes it easier for businesses to pay taxes, adding also that there is an arrangement with the Bank of Ghana to block payments to service providers that do not comply.
“We need to reverse the trend in terms of our revenue and the contribution of Value Added Tax to our tax in Ghana. The idea is to cover all institutions no matter where they operate to pay the tax,” he said. Owusu-Amoah also said taxpayers and their software developers would be engaged and provided with the application programming interface between now and the end of March to ensure that they synchronise their systems.
Previously, Ghana’s Minister of Finance, Ken Ofori-Atta had lamented the low number of tax-compliant companies in the country, revealing that only 2.4 million people out of a population of 30.8 million Ghanaians pay direct taxes. In 2021, it announced the launch of an e-levy that taxes all digital transactions, a move that has caused controversy among Ghanaians and on the floor of parliament. Meanwhile, https://newscentral.africa/2022/03/01/ghana-akufo-addo-insists-e-levy-essential-for-national-development/Ghana’s President Nana Akufo-Addo has insisted that implementing it will ensure that all Ghanaians contribute their fair share, and insists it’s essential for the national development of the country.
The new digital tax regime kicks off on April 1 2022.
