The Ghana Anti-Corruption Coalition has organized a round table discussion on domestic revenue mobilization to see how best the country will improve in its generation of revenue from domestic resources.
Research and Policy Officer at GACC, Mr. Harrison Cudjoe explained that the exercise was also aimed at exploring ways through which the nation could promote increased accountability.
According to him, revenue generation is one of the most important aspects of economic growth, thus efforts must be adopted to properly utilise the resources generated.
The major highlight of the roundtable discussion he said was on how best we could mobilise revenue to manage the educational sector.
He referred to the announcement by the Finance Minister that there would be no new taxes in 2020, but rather a restructure of the tax system and a move to develop a comprehensive revenue policy and strategy to address the challenges of revenue mobilisation.
The move the minister said will involve lending the necessary support to the Ghana Revenue Authority to boost revenue collection in order to meet its revenue targets.
“We will take radical policy and institutional reforms towards raising our tax-to-GDP ratio over the medium term from under 13 percent currently to around 20 percent. The focus will be on efficiency and base-broadening rather than imposing new taxes on our people and businesses. This way, we can raise our domestic contribution to our ambitious transformation agenda, in line with the Ghana Beyond Aid vision,” the Minister said on Wednesday.
Reacting to it, Mr. Cudjoe said GACC would as part of its project engage the Ghana Revenue Authority and other stakeholders to meet the target proposed by the minister.
He also hinted of plans by GACC to meet with the Budget Division at the Ministry of Finance, the Monitory and Evaluation Department as well as some taxpayers.
The main focus for the coalition he stressed is geared towards assisting the government to meet its revenue target.
He said as a civil society, their goal is to police the system by ensuring that we can achieve the targets we’ve set for ourselves.
”We want Ghana to progress and transform and that is why we have embarked on this campaign,” he stated.
The goal is to to help the government, improve their domestic resource mobilization, he told Rainbow Radio’s Afia Kwarteng.
He said the coalition, will support all strategies to improve domestic revenue mobilization.
Source: Rashid Obodai Provencal||rainbowradioonline.com
