Economist and Professor of Finance, Godfred Bokpin has expressed disappointment over government’s lack of action to stop the country from losing millions of Ghana cedis to tax exemptions, especially now when the country needs to be generating even more revenue.

According to him, it is appalling that for a country that loses more than $2.27 billion annually to tax exemptions, the government is instead sponsoring the e-levy as a salvation levy.

He stated that the government should rather be concerned with plugging its many tax exemptions to save revenue than introducing new taxes.

“I want us to go to the 2019 State of the Nation Address given by our own President. In that State of the Nation Address, the President told us that the biggest threat to our domestic revenue mobilization strategy is exemptions.

“This was our own President, and I want to believe that this was borne out of a rigorous analyses and the President to make matters serious for all of us told us that if we don’t do anything about it, if we continue at this rate, in less than 16 years, Ghana will give more than half of our revenue base away by way of exemptions.”

According to him, after the President had made that declaration, he and many others were hopeful that something would be done to solve the problem.

However, three years after the Bill was passed, nothing has been done to resolve the situation.

In the meantime, the country, he says, loses more than $2.27 billion to tax exemptions annually.

“If you have a state, a government that came to this conclusion, and that government said that they had sent an exemptions bill to Parliament to deal with it, and we’re talking about three years or so and nothing has happened about this, then we should be worried. Look, in that State of the Nation Address, the President told us that in 2018 we lost 4.66 billion Ghana cedis to just an aspect of exemptions which has to do with import duty, import VAT and all of that excluding other exemptions.

“We are talking about 4.66 billion cedis. Per our own estimation and estimates exist across several think tanks that we are losing annually more than $2.27 billion, and if you don’t want to do anything about this, and your proposal is as though a salvation is in e-levy, it’s most unfortunate,” he added.