GRA can rake in more revenue when leakages are blocked - Commissioner

Colonel (rtd) Kwadwo Damoah, the Commissioner, Customs Division of the Ghana Revenue Authority has emphasized the need for the country to block the various leakages in the revenue generation channels.

According to him, the GRA is missing out on huge sums of money due to leakages in the system.

He noted in a Joy News interview that if all aspects of the customs regime were working effectively, the Custom Division of the GRA would have raked in more revenue than it targets.

“Once one person smuggles any item, that’s a leakage and we all know that the borders are so porous such that there are places that are not accessible by way of using vehicles. There are places that you use mono bicycles, there are places that people on foot are able to evade the system so all those would impact so once you are talking about total, total means by land, sea and air so even there is one leakage by land it affects the total possibility,” he said on Joy News.

He added, “if everything should work as the system has it then all may not be lost” in terms of meeting the target of 2021.

He further indicated that Customs could have had more revenue if they were able to have an effective post clearance audit within 2020.

Colonel (rtd) Kwadwo Asamoah said that customs ability to generate more revenue was impacted by its inability conduct an effective post-clearance audit.

He disclosed that his outfit had to suspend some of its auditing activities due to the Covid-19.

“It may not be possible to have effective post clearance audit with all transactions within a financial year and you are talking about 2020, so did any audit goes into 2020, it means casting your mind back in 2020 you could have had more if we had been able to do the post clearance audit within 2020.”

“Last year because of Covid-19, we had to suspend a lot of audit activities because it meant that sending teams because the aim was as much as possible to use electronic means to do things, we were not able to a lot of the physical post clearance audit.

“It had to be virtual using the same document that we used to clear the goods so if we’re not able to have the opportunity to clear physically to check and compare with what we have by way of documentation then we still risk not realising the maximum revenue from these transactions,” he stated.