Former Chief Executive Officer of the National Pensions Regulatory Authority (NPRA), Dr. Daniel Seddoh, says it is about time government engaged with revenue generators to find ways to improve revenue generation.
According to him, while the Ghana Revenue Authority in recent times has been doing a yeoman’s job in relation to revenue generation, it was time they went 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,” he said on JoyNews’ PM Express Business Edition.
He stated that while there are real challenges in the economy, most of the issues hampering economic growth are government’s activities.
Dr. Seddoh says 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’re 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’re still going to have challenges going forward. If we want businesses to pay tax throw something at them, encourage them to do well.
“Our first responsibility is to get people employed so that households can live decent lives…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,” he said.
