He expressed optimism that before the end of the year, GRA would attain the 2021 revenue target as tasked by the government for national development.
He praised his staff for their hard work, commitment and professionalism in the execution of their duties. He equally commended the public enterprise companies for their voluntary tax compliance; saying without that GRA would have found it very difficult to collect billions of dalasi on a monthly basis.
CG Darboe further explained that GRA was established by an Act of Parliament and the primary role of GRA is to collect the much needed revenue for the government.
He cited that “whatever we do, if we are not performing the revenue collection, then we will be question?”
According to CG, a lot of people outside there do not understand how GRA operates. “We as a Revenue Authority, we always have a contract with the government and in implementing this contract; we involve our development partners such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF). This means before the beginning of every new year, we would sit as a Revenue Authority with government and then an annual revenue target would be set up for GRA,” Mr. Darboe explained.
“This target does not come blindly. It is based on statistics that we have on the ground and we also do it based on the formulas that we use.”
According to CG Darboe, every target that comes in has a base and connection somewhere. “Once the target is agreed between GRA and the government, it now becomes GRA's primary role to make sure that the target is collected for the government.”
Government, he added, has programmes and those programmes are based on the availability of the revenue. “So it becomes a very serious issue once the target is agreed upon. We take it upon ourselves to make sure that we collect that target on a monthly basis because if we don’t do so, the government will find it difficult to implement programmes.”
“GRA has a responsibility to work towards that target on a yearly basis, quarterly basis and monthly basis,” CD Darbe said, adding like other places, it has been a very difficult situation for them in the past year because of Covid-19.
He explained that when Covid-19 came, “we realised that the borders were closed, the airport was closed, and trade was a problem as most of the businesses had closed. And you know we get our money from the people; from the businesses. Now if the businesses are not working, where do you expect us to get the revenue? So this has become very difficult.”
“The money we collect from the tourism industry is totally zero. It’s from this industry that we have PAYEs from the staff that are there, and we do have corporate tax and the VAT and other taxes that we collect, but when Covid-19 came, all these things went zero.”
“We could not collect anything, so we only had to depend on the few imported and the few businesses that exist. It was really very difficult for us, but due to the dedicated and hardworking staff, we were able to meet the government target by increasing the efficiency, our intelligence, and our enforcement on the ground because the country has to survive and in doing so, we increase our hours of working too.”
He called on all hands to be on deck to support GRA in attaining its revenue target by voluntarily coming forward and settling tax obligations.
He emphasised that GRA alone cannot do it all and thus requires collective effort to collect more revenue for the government.
