Finance minister Ken Ofori Atta has indicated that the largest set of domestic tax contributors are in the Greater Accra Region with an average of 88.83 % in the last four years.
Ashanti, Western and Eastern Regions together contribute barely 3 percent of domestic taxes. The minister of finance decried these figures saying, “compared to our peers within the middle-income brackets, these statistics are a poor reflection on us and we need to change the narrative. We must resolve that by the next census, we should have changed these statistics to become an Upper Middle-Income Country in line with our Ghana Beyond Aid agenda. We must eclipse a 20% threshold of revenue to GDP ratio by 2024.”
Hon. Ofori Atta promised the government’s continuous efforts in ensuring tax compliance in the country.
“Mr. Speaker, revenue compliance and enforcement sits at the heart of domestic revenue mobilization. The Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA), buoyed by RACE, will continue with its enhanced compliance measures to expand coverage and plug revenue leakages.”
After the completion of the preliminary report on the 2021 Population and Housing Census by the Ghana Statistical Service, the data presented showed that out of the total population of 30.8 million, only 2,364,348 persons are bearing the burden of the entire population as taxpayers as of August 2021.
Out of the registered voter population of 17,027,941 as of 2020, only 1,643,839 persons are captured by SSNIT as active contributors to Tier 1 pensions and 2,107,322 (less than 10 percent of the total population) as active contributors to Tier 2 as of June 2021.
The data also indicated that only 45,109 entities are registered as corporate taxpayers and only 54,364 persons are registered as self-employed taxpayers at the Ghana Revenue Authority.
Also, only 136,198 entities are registered businesses at the Registrar-General’s Dept. as of August 2021 of which 80 percent are self-employed.