The Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA) is set to crack the whip on Ghanaians who refuse to disclose their sources of taxable income overseas. According to the authority, such persons when caught would be penalized severely.

Speaking on behalf of the GRA, Edward Gyamerah, the Commissioner of the Domestic Tax Revenue Division revealed that this initiative would be implemented under the voluntary disclosure programme.

According to him, the voluntary disclosure programme would allow workers with taxable income overseas to disclose them to the GRA without any penalty.

“Over the years, this has been a big challenge where most people are not disclosing this. Now we’ve signed an arrangement with other jurisdictions.

"Currently, we have 145 countries that are providing us with information on resident Ghanaians having accounts elsewhere,” Gyamerah explained in an engagement with the media.

He added, “So we’ve gone through a process and come up with how individuals, persons, companies, entities, etc. have this income and have not disclosed to the Ghana Revenue Authority to use this opportunity to provide the source to GRA.”

Touching on the sanctions to be meted out to offenders, he mentioned that penalties would be in two forms, administrative sanction and judicial sanctions.

On sanctions to be applied to those found culpable, he said “We have the administrative sanction and we have the judicial sanctions.

He explained, “So for us, we first raise an assessment of you, expecting you to come [and pay up]. If you fail to pay, of course, we have the judicial aspect where we can go to court and let the judiciary help us enforce the collection of the tax. We will use all enforcement procedures to ensure the collections of the tax.”

EAN/FNOQ

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