Tracking and identifying online vendors will make collection of taxes easier – Law lecturer

Inability to track online vendors plagues revenue collection

GRA to tax e-commerce, gaming, and bet

GRA must develop a platform for tracking revenue from e-commerce vendors

A lecturer at the University of Ghana’s School of Law, William Kofi Owusu Demitia, has intimated that for Ghana to be able to rope in the e-commerce sector and collect enough taxes, it needs to identify taxpayers and

Read full article.track their earnings.

“It’s all about identifying taxpayers and tracking their earnings.” He emphasized.

He was speaking at the Graphic Business Breakfast meeting held on Tuesday, March 22, 2022.

He detailed that e-commerce provides the opportunity for the GRA to easily track the data of online vendors and collect taxes.

“Two things plague our ability to generate enough revenue in this part of our world: our problem to identify task payers and our ability to track their income to find out whether they are fulfilling their tax obligations."

“Quite on the contrary, I believe e-commerce provides us a perfect solution to address that. Today, in the comfort of your home you can go on any ride-sharing app and order that someone picks you up to the place."

“For you to be able to do that, you must register with the app, for a driver to be certified he must be certified to drive you, that person must be registered with that app. What we are seeing here is that data is being generated and so the issue of identifying a taxpayer if the person is operating on an e-commerce platform is largely addressed.”

“The biggest problem is what do we do with the data and how authorities are liaising with these data aggregators to get the information?” Mr. Demitia asked.

He further stated that tracking online vendors will become an easier task if “we could add another layer which will enable a vendor or a person providing an e-commerce service add their Taxpayer Identification Number (TIN) and data can instantly go to the GRA and they can trace how much income the vendor makes instantly.”

Meanwhile, the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA) has announced the piloting of a platform to tax e-commerce gaming and bet will commence in April 2022.

This it believes will help in achieving its revenue target.