Dr. Daniel Seddoh, former Chief Executive Officer of the National Pensions Regulatory Authority (NPRA), has opined that it is about time government engaged with businesses in order to find ways to improve revenue generation in the country.
According to him, while the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA) in recent times has been doing a a good job in relation to revenue generation, it is time the Authority goes a step further to engage businesses on bottlenecks affecting revenue generation.
“Now if you take a business that is not paying the desired tax, my view is that, get closer to them and try to understand what their difficulty is. I do not believe everybody is out there not to pay tax. I believe in paying the due taxes, but work with them, eliminate the bottlenecks, set them up to be profitable and encourage them to pay the right taxes. I believe they will do that.”
Dr Daniel
Dr. Seddoh divulged that while there are real challenges in the economy, most of the issues hindering economic growth are government’s activities. He suggested that a sure way to overcome these issues is by government offering businesses support in the hope that businesses will become profitable to generate more revenue for government.
“My personal view is; if you look at our economy critically, the inefficiencies that we have that create problems for most people and the reason why they are not profitable come through government activities.
“Until we stop and try to look at that and have a mindset of government first giving to industry so that industry can respond and reciprocate we are still going to have challenges going forward. If we want businesses to pay tax throw something at them, encourage them to do well.”
Dr Daniel
The former CEO to a greater extent indicated that, “Our first responsibility is to get people employed, so that households can live decent live. So let’s sit up to create businesses that can be run profitably. We know the challenges with the SOEs, so we must appreciate the challenges with other private businesses.”
The Real Issue Of DDEP Is The Quality Of GDP
Speaking on the debt exchange programme, Dr. Daniel Seddoh, made known that the argument, that government would not be able to meet its financial obligations without a debt exchange does not hold water.
According to him, the argument is incorrect on the basis that citizens continue to pay taxes to government and economic activity is constantly being generated, thus government would consequently be able to generate revenue.
“We should be careful raising that argument except you are saying that we have stopped paying taxes, except you are saying we have stopped generating economic activity.”
Dr Daniel
The former CEO stated that the other argument that Ghanaians are not paying enough taxes to support the economy is also quite unsound.
“ I do not believe in that school of thought. The real issue for people like me is the quality of the GDP we produce. Now the GDP must generate for you what we call the chargeable income. That is the profit before tax.
“But if we are highly inefficient and we can’t generate profit before tax, we will run into the kind of trouble we are seeing. And most of the entities that are not able to generate profit before tax are the state owned enterprises.”
Dr Daniel
Mr Seddoh further noted that, “So if what the government owned business cannot be used to generate profits and then you now come back and turn on those who can work to generate profit, you’re creating a problem that will be difficult to solve. What am I saying?”
“If you look at us, the way we’ve configured ourselves, the financial services, the telcos, even that and probably the oil and gas that’s where the profitability is coming from. So when you descend on those sectors, you’re setting up yourself for failure and we need to pay attention to these things.”
Dr Daniel
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