The Commissioner General of the Ghana Revenue Authority, Mr Amishaddai Owusu Amoah has appealed to individuals and businesses to take advantage of the Penalty and Interest Waiver Act, 2021 to ensure they are in good standing with the law.
The initiative which was announced in the 2021 budget is meant to help businesses and individuals deal with the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic by scraping all penalties and interest accrued on tax defaults up to December 31 2020.
In an interview with Citi Business News on the sidelines of a press conference organized by the Ghana Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Rev. Ammishaddai Owusu-Amoah urged all affected persons to ensure their principal obligations are settled by December 31, 2021.
“We’re aware of a number of new initiatives that the Minister of Finance announced. I want to take this opportunity to emphasize on two of them. The first is the waver of penalty and interest. The requirement is that any task payer who currently has outstanding taxes and penalties and interest computed up to the end of the last year 2020, you can apply before the end of September and make an arrangement to pay before the end of December.
This means by the end of September, your application should have been received and we would have discussed it and come out with an arrangement for you to pay. Once you’re able to pay before the end of December 2021, we’ll waive all the penalties and all the interest. I want to encourage that we should take advantage of these arrangement that the government has out in place as part of the Covid-19 alleviation initiatives,”he said.
It will be recalled that on 10 May 2021, the Ghana Revenue Authority published a notice clarifying the implementation of tax policies introduced in the 2021 Budget Statement and Economic Policy which includes a waiver of penalties and interest on accumulated arrears.
The policy which is now an Act grants a waiver of penalties and interest on accumulated tax arrears through December 2020 for persons who make arrangements with the GRA for payment of the principal tax by December 2021 and provides for related matters.
The Act provides that the Commissioner General of the GRA shall not recover accumulated penalties and interest on the tax arrears paid in respect of the relevant period, on or before 31 of December 2021.
It further stated that a person granted the waiver is not liable for prosecution or any other enforcement action with respect to the tax due for the relevant period.
To qualify for the amnesty, a person must complete registration for the waiver, on or before 30 September 2021.