Financial consultant Emmanuel Ashley says although it will be challenging for the government following its decision to scrap some taxes, it is the best approach to take.
He asserted that it would be prudent to scrap all these nuisance taxes to give Ghanaian businesses some relief while expanding the tax net to get more people to pay their taxes.
In the 2025 Budget, Finance Minister Dr Cassiel Ato Forson announced the removal of five nuisance taxes, including E-Levy and Betting Tax.
He explained that the scrapping of these taxes is to ease the burden on citizens and businesses. Delivering the budget on March 11, 2025, the minister stated that although the government remains committed to increasing non-oil tax revenue by 0.6 percentage points of GDP under the IMF-supported programme, it was important to scrap the taxes to improve disposable incomes, support business growth, and enhance tax compliance.
Reacting to this, Emmanuel Ashley admitted that it would be challenging for the government to scrap these taxes, but that is the only way we can move forward as a country.
He bemoaned the situation where authorities sell imported cars and other items so cheap because the importers were unable to pay duty on them. He argued that it would be best to reduce the cost of duty for the importer to pay rather than having an outrageous cost of duty that will prevent the importer from retrieving their cars.
‘If you can sell the vehicles so cheap to officials in the public sector, why don’t you sell them back to the one who imported them? These are the laws we have to try to enforce to work. After the duty, you are required to also pay tax on your profits. The laws are all there, and we have to try our best to enforce them.’
He was also worried that the majority of property owners are not paying their rent tax.
Emmanuel Ashley advised the government to enforce the various tax laws to ensure that every individual pays tax.
He was speaking to Sir Richie on ‘As it is in Ghana’ on Rainbow Radio 92.4FM, UK. Ghana has a capital gains tax that requires that when you sell anything, including your house, artistic impression with value, but are we enforcing this law? Like I said, several property owners are not paying rent tax. Only a handful of people pay the rent tax. So the problem we have is that if we are scrapping these taxes, we have to enforce the tax rules so Ghanaians will pay their taxes.
People are selling houses in the thousands to millions of dollars, and yet they are not paying taxes on them. On the issue of galamsey, people are selling gold and paying nothing on it. So I agree with you that it is going to be challenging, but if we streamline the tax system and enforce the laws, we will generate the needed resources to manage the country.”
By: Rainbowradioonline.com/Ghana
