A Director at the Budget Division of the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning, Mr Kwadwo Awua-Peasah, has observed that most of the metropolitan, municipal and district assemblies were unable to meet their revenue targets because they had no reliable data on which to rely on for the collection. "There is no data in many of the District Assemblies to show how much revenue to collect from sources like markets under their jurisdiction," he pointed out. Apart from this handicap, he said the revenue collectors were also ill-equipped and not adequately trained to undertake the job of revenue collection while some corrupt practices had all combined to make internal revenue generation in many of the assemblies very difficult. He made these remarks at a one-day workshop on this year's budget at Wa organized by the Ministry for Financial Administrators, Budget and Planning officers drawn from the various Municipal and district Assemblies in the Upper West region. Mr Awua-Peasah debunked suggestions from some of the participants that the Internal Revenue Service should be tasked with collecting the tolls, rates and fees for the assemblies, by saying that it would be difficult since that would involve changing the revenue laws of the country. How often such monies would be made available for the day-to-day running of the Assemblies was also questionable and could also be a huge problem, he explained. Participants were taken through topics such as Budget processes, micro-economic performance, sectoral performance, trend analysis and the implementation challenges. He said the overriding objective of this year's budget was to remove all bottlenecks that hampered agricultural growth in the mid-term, in order to develop the industrial sector in the long term, and advised them to read the budget statement to see the opportunities in it. Contrary to assertions by some social commentators, he said developments in the Energy sector were captured by the budget, especially the acquisition and installation of a 300 megawatts power generating plant at Tema and another 80 megawatts of electricity to be generated from the Osagyefo barge by the end of August this year. Source: GNA