The Ghana Revenue Authority, GRA, has set a target of GHS 60 billion as its revenue target for 2021.

This comes despite the ravaging impact of COVID-19 on the economy.

Speaking at a press briefing in Accra, Commissioner-General of the GRA, Rev. Ammishaddai Owusu-Amoah, said though the amount is ambitious, the Authority has mapped out strategies to ensure that it meets the target for this year.

“We are not stopping there, whiles we are waiting for the Minister of Finance to tell us the overall budget that we have to collect for 2021, we have set for ourselves an aggressive target of collecting 60 billion in 2021. This represents about 32 percent year-on-year increase if we compare to the 45 million that we collected this year. Definitely, this is an ambitious target, but we have underlying strategies and programs to ensure that we will be able to get to this target,” he said.

Already, new data released by the Ghana Revenue Authority, GRA, shows that it has exceeded its 42.7 billion Ghana Cedi tax revenue target for 2020 by 2.6 billion. This follows a revision of the earlier target to 42.7 billion Ghana Cedi from 47.25 billion Ghana Cedi due to the impact of COVID-19.

The authority collected GH¢45.338 billion for the year under review, as against a target of GH¢42.7 billion, representing a 6% above the target and a 3.3% year-on-year over the same period in 2019.

The Commissioner-General of the GRA, Rev. Ammishaddai Owusu-Amoah, said the excellent performance by the authority was because of its strategy to focus on certain areas such as the financial and telecom sectors which were less impacted by COVID-19.

“We initially had a budget from the Ministry of Finance of 47.25 billion for the 2020 fiscal year. This represented an increase of 7.6 percent. That is the growth year-on-year compared to 43.9 billion that we collected in the 2019 fiscal year. However, during the midyear review, as a result of the impact of the COVID-19, the target was reviewed downwards to 42.7.”

“This represented a 6.2 percent negative growth. In order words, if you compare the 42.7 to the previous year then it means that we are going to collect less taxes in 2020. But despite the challenges of COVID-19, the GRA was able to exceed the revised target. This means that we exceeded the revised target by 2.6 billion which is more or less about 6% above the target,” he said.