GRA gets GHC 1.2 billion for 2019 financial year

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

The Finance Committee of Parliament revealed theamount is to ensure the GRA delivers its registration and issuance of Tax payer Identification Numbers [TIN] mandate and a means to ensure efficient tax collection by the authority.

In an interview with Accra-based Citi FM, Chairman of the Finance Committee of Parliament, Mark Assibey Yeboah explained that the GHC 1.2 Billion allocation to the GRA was an incentive to the authority due to their tax collection revenue for the year.

“So the law says that not exceeding three per centwill be allocated to GRA , so for last year they got 2.44 per cent of the taxes, for 2019 the government has agreed with them that they will get 2.66 per centof 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 theirbudget allocation is. So it’s an incentive to them because we want to incentivise them to collect more taxes”, he said.

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

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

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.