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IRS Begins Exercise To Improve Revenue |
| The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is embarking on a country-wide exercise to retrieve taxes from the undeclared incomes of individuals and institutions to improve the revenue base of the country. |
Accordingly, the Training Division of the IRS is intensifying its campaign on private educational institutions which, over the years, have failed to file their tax returns on incomes earned outside their regular jobs.
The Assistant Commissioner of the IRS with responsibility for training, Mr Sefah Agyebeng, told the Media that the exercise formed part of the Revenue Week.
He explained that seminars were currently going on in the regions for heads of private educational institutions to sensitise them to the need to improve upon their compliance level, especially in the area of tax declarations on undeclared incomes.
He said the education centred on the processes involved in filing tax returns and the various types of returns, particularly on withholding tax, which he explained was an amount deducted in advance from the payment of a contractee or a payee by an authorised agent of the commissioner of the service and further accounted to the commissioner.
According to him, the law mandated that payments to examination invigilators, supervisors, examiners, as well as contribution from parent-teacher associations (PTA)s which were earned from outside the normal employment job, were all taxable under the law.
“Ghanaians need to be educated to appreciate the fact that as long as you earn some form of income, it attracts a tax, except in specific cases where exemptions are made,” he said.
Mr Agyebeng categorised extra classes into two, saying that the first was those conducted on school premises where heads of the institutions were expected to withhold the tax in trust for the IRS, while the second were classes held in homes, with the law mandating the teacher to file returns to the IRS, although the law did not permit an individual on his own to file.
The assistant commissioner indicated that under the law, a withholding agent should furnish the commissioner with returns on taxes withheld from payments made to payees within 15 days after the month in which the payments were made.
He added that failure to comply attracted a penalty ranging from GH¢6 each day in default for individuals and GH¢12 for companies.
Mr Agyebeng said although the revenue-generating agencies exceeded the revenue targets set for each year, it was not enough, since what mattered was to ensure an increase in the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
To that end, he called on income earners to honestly declare their incomes to revenue authorities to enable the commissioner to make a fair assessment of their claims.
Source: Graphic
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