Commissioner General of the Ghana Revenue Authority, Reverend Dr. Ammishaddai Owusu-Amoah, says in an effort to ramp up revenue mobilization, the Authority is planning to connect all VAT registered vendors to their common platform.

According to him, the common platform is primarily to ensure compliance as well as do away with cumbersome manual invoicing.

This follows the GRA’s deployment of officials to various vending sites across the country early in the year to physically enforce compliance to the VAT regime.

The deployment had not gone down well with vendors who felt the GRA’s tactic was abrasive and injurious to their businesses.

However, the GRA insists the deployment had generated more revenue implying some vendors had previously not been fully complying with the VAT regime.

Speaking on JoyNews’ PM Express Business Edition, Dr. Owusu-Amoah said the GRA was working assiduously to connect all VAT registered vendors to the GRA’s common system to ensure much effective compliance.

This he says will be achieved by the end of 2024.

In the meantime, the GRA is targeting registering about 1,600 vendors onto the VAT system in 2023 as part of measures to widen and deepen the tax pool.

“For 2023, I’ve said that 1,600 VAT will come on board. For 2024, it will become a compliance issue that nobody who is VAT registered sells without connecting to our system. And so we’ll be doing away with the manual writing, the invoices completely in 2024.

“As I said the pilot has done well so far, and I speak we’re evaluating. When I say we’re evaluating, we’re trying to see what we need to improve, and any areas that we think that did well and we need to improve further, what we did not do well we have to improve further. And we have resources on ground, including some external resources that are helping us to evaluate.

“When I say external resources, countries that have done it before, who have also gone through these stages and therefore they’re on the ground right as I speak now with us. And once we finish the evaluation, then we implement the measures that we have seen. And so 2023, 1,600, 2024 by year end everybody who sells and is a VAT registered must be hooked onto our system,” he said.