The Vice President, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, has started the Revenue Assurance and Compliance Enforcement (RACE) program, as pledged in the 2021 mid-year budget review, as part of measures to enable effective and efficient revenue mobilization in the nation.
RACE’s mission is to discover and eradicate revenue leakages in Ghana’s different sectors of the economy.
Dr. Bawumia said during the initiative’s introduction that the initiative’s success is dependent on its capacity to utilize technology.
“The effectiveness of the RACE initiative depends on the ability to leverage on technology and to integrate the rich databases from the Ghana Card, the TIN, Digital Address system, Passport and DVLA databases amongst others. The timing of the implementation of the RACE initiative rides on the back of the integration of the diverse databases now available for planning purposes. We expect that RACE will power the efforts of Government to stay the course in terms of its economic targets and to return the economy to a path of fiscal sustainability by 2024.”
The project was launched in cooperation with the Ministry of Finance. Charles Adu-Boahen, Minister of State at the Ministry of Finance, said that the effort would assist drive the government to meet its economic targets and restore the economy to normality.
“At the launch of the Ghana.gov platform, I mentioned that COVID-19 is a crisis that requires bold and imaginative measures to lead the charge for a sustainable ‘build back’ and recovery. The RACE initiative thus forms part of the Government’s proactive efforts to move our tax revenue to GDP of 14.3% closer to the 18% average for sub-Saharan Africa over the immediate to the near term, and possibly move beyond 20% over the long run.”
For many years, Ghana has wasted vast sums of money owing to a lack of effective tax collecting methods and an inability to monitor the numbers.
The Ghana Collection Authority has seen a GHS212 million deficit in tax revenue in the first half of 2021 alone.
The Authority earned GHS25.89 billion in tax income, compared to the goal of 26.1 billion cedis for the period.
The Finance Minister announced the establishment of the Revenue Assurance and Compliance Enforcement (RACE) program in the recent mid-year budget review to assist the nation in meeting its revenue mobilization goal.
RACE is intended to detect and remove revenue leaks while strengthening a compliance culture, particularly in sectors such as petroleum bunkering, gold, and resource export, port operations, transit goods, warehousing, and free zone activities.
It also seeks to improve the revenue-to-GDP ratio and guarantee high tax compliance in order to assist the execution of the Ghana CARES Obaatanpa program.
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