Terkper on why we should protect the VAT base
Former Minister of Finance and National Coordinator of the Value Added Tax (VAT) Project, Mr Seth Terkper has expressed his opinion on why he thinks the VAT base should be protected.
The Finance Committee of Parliament is to submit its report to the House on the VAT 12.5%); NHIL 2.5%)
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A)
B)
C) Zero-rating (exports): VAT Act, as saved in levy Bills
D) Input Tax Credit (ITC): Relevant VAT Act provision is blocked for NHIL and GETFund supplies through amendments to levy Bills.
E) Rates:
What changed?
We have argued, already, that the essence of the proposals is simply to block Input Tax Credit (ITC) for the
While not specific, we are certain that the import tax component of the
Could these have been done with an amendment to the VAT Act to block the Input Tax Credit (ITC) for NHIL and GETFund purposes? My humble submission is "Yes". Instead, what we have done is to increase the complexity of a simple consumption tax regime and its compliance with multiple structures.
Confusing PFM purposes
We are confusing the allocation or earmarking of budget resources for health and education purposes, after the collection of the substantive taxes and levies.
A good example is the pooling of petroleum revenues under the PRMA. We use
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Ghana runs the risk of not being taken seriously with our backward move to reinstate the multiple consumption taxes (i.e., sales tax, service tax, super-sales tax) that the VAT replaced
Proposal
Besides their collection as import duty, may I then propose that a further explicit amendment is moved to the
This will ease the task for both Registered Businesses and Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA). We can figure out how MOF and GRA can allocate the amount collected, as we have been doing already.
Conclusion
Is there something more subtle to what we are doing, which is why we had to set aside a simple and
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Perhaps, after 20