The Finance Minister of Ghana, Mr. Ken Ofori-Atta has revealed that some lawyers in the country are swerving the payment of taxes in the country.
He also mentioned that per an exercise conducted by the Ghana Revenue Authority, it was found that several doctors and over 60,000 business people have equally been swerving tax payment.
The Finance Minister said thanks to the National ID, GRA has 15.5 million TINS as compared to in the past where it only had 5.5 Tax Identification Numbers.
“so, once upon a time, we had 5.5 million Tax Identification Numbers… which most of us try to dodge…now today, because of the National ID, GRA has 15.5 million TINs. Now that’s triple.”
He made this comment while speaking in an interview on Asaase Radio.
Speaking about the exercise conducted by the GRA, he said; “and then we went through the exercise to sort of titrate to see what we’ve got, and we got about 60,000 businesspeople who were not paying taxes…some 5,000 or 6,000 lawyers are not. Some doctors [are not paying income tax]…so you begin to see all of these professionals, all of us on social media ranting against the government and that most of these people are not even paying taxes.”
“So if you look at the multiplier effect of that…we are currently at about 14% of revenue-to-GDP ratio and our peers are 18% to 21%,” he noted.
