The Minister of Finance and Economic Planning, Mr Kwadwo Baah-Wiredu, has announced long-term measures to ensure tax compliance in the informal sector. These include, simplification of tax laws and administrative procedures for easy understanding by the average self-employed taxpayer, the introduction of comprehensive taxpayer education, information and assistance programmes aimed at converting taxpayer resistance to taxpayer compliance, as well as strategic customer services to enhance the integrity of tax administration. Mr Baah-Wiredu announced this at the opening of a two-day conference on “Enterprise Formalisation in Africa” organised by the Foreign Investment Advisory Service (FIAS) of the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC) and the Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research (ISSER) in Accra yesterday. He said the introduction of basic taxation principles as a subject in the educational system to provide basic knowledge on the civic responsibility for the young, increased enforcement actions against delinquent taxpayers and motivation for tax administrators and payers would serve as long term solutions to the challenges of tax compliance. According to him, it is estimated by the Labour Department that informal enterprises employed about 80 per cent of the labour force in Ghana and added that due to its large size, most of them operated without tax payer identification which posed a big challenge to tax administration. It was against this background that the government plans to introduce innovative methods to mobilise tax in the country, having considered that the transition from informal to formal enterprises was crucial. The Minister of Trade, Industry, Private Sector Development and Presidential Special Initiative, Mr Alan Kyeremanten, challenged participants at the conference to deliberate on issues which would aid government to promote the formalisation of enterprises in their countries. Among these issues are government’s role in investing in financial institutions that facilitate the provision of business development services, provision of infrastructure, commercial and marketing linkages and the provision of technical development services. He said although Ghana had attained its 50th independence anniversary, it had not gained economic independence and added that “Ghana is seeking economic independence in the modest way with an ambitious vision of becoming a middle income country”. Graphic