Benchmark system is not a valuation method – Customs, GRA

The Customs Division of the Ghana Revenue Authority has indicated that the benchmark system is not a valuation method, and as such, urging the public to refrain from that misconception.

Speaking on Eye on Port, a Principal Revenue Officer at the Customs Technical Services Bureau (CTSB), Mr. Bilson Jahdab Atagbah said, contrary to popular opinion, the benchmark system is only an internal risk assessment tool used administratively to detect over-invoicing, under-invoicing, as well as check commercial and procurement fraud.

“We use it to align and sanitize our database and it serves as a guide or yardstick. It is not a valuation method. The Risk Management Unit uses it a lot to see the deviation of the values of a particular product. It aims to get the true reflection of the international price.”

He said the benchmark values are arrived at through intelligence gathered from the Tax Pre-Paid (TPD) method, the letters of commitment (LOC), stakeholder engagements with industry and high level integrity institutions.

The customs official emphasized that the benchmark system is not for value substitution.

“It only serves as a guide for what we do, to ensure no one is giving a value too low or too high than they are required for the purposes of tax extraction.”

“If you end up paying so much, you’re over-invoicing and we have to detect how you are doing that. By over-invoicing, it is affecting your total profit because the more cost you have, reduces your profit margin therefore domestic tax payment will reduce which means the domestic unit will not have much tax to collect,” he added.

He said the benchmark system which had been used as a guide in customs valuation, is no more being used due to the massive misconception it had created within the trading community.

Mr. Bilson Jahdab Atagbah said this misconception was further enhanced during the communication of the discount policy government applied to duties in 2019.

He clarified that the 50% and 30% discounts traders enjoyed on general goods and vehicles respectively was applicable to the duties payable and not unit values.