Tax expert and consultant Abdallah Ali-Nakyea has warned the government against any efforts to stop collecting the COVID-19 levy, despite the fact that the disease is no longer considered a global threat.
He argued that if taxes were eliminated without being replaced by another means of generating revenue, the burden on citizens would only increase.
Speaking at the recently ended Vodafone Business Runway in Accra, he said, “I have always held that it is not a tax I wish should be scrapped. The reason is that, remember, when the government came to power, we all celebrated the scrapping of 16 tax types. Today, imagine the number of taxes coming back, so it shows it wasn’t the right approach in the first place.”
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In order to address the concerns expressed by Ghanaians regarding the continued payment of the COVID-19 levy, Ali-Nakyea suggested renaming the levy to better reflect the difficulties facing the health sector.
“We could have scrapped two the following year, gradually, and so we would have been able to find other means. The reason I am saying this is that supposing we scrap COVID-19 Levy, today the challenges Korle Bu Teaching Hospital is having with dialysis, are we going to introduce dialysis levy?”
He went on to say, “So, I think the name given to it might have been the cause of the problem. We really have a lot of problems in the health sector, and any revenue should be channeled to solve them.”
The government instituted the 1% levy during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in Ghana in order to offer financial support for fighting the virus and its repercussions.
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