A private legal practitioner, David Ofosu-Dorte, is advocating legislation that would limit taxes imposed on citizens by the government.
Delivering a public lecture titled “The 1992 Constitution: A Fundamental Law for our prosperity or a well-crafted guide for our economic doom” Mr Ofosu-Dorte said Ghana’s taxation system piles more pressure on already overburdened tax payers which can stifle private businesses.
He said limiting the government from introducing more taxes would also prevent the government from recklessly spending and limit its appetite for borrowing.
“There must be an upper limit where the government cannot tax more…otherwise they will continue to increase their expenditure and they will pass on the expenditure. Also, we must limit the government’s ability to borrow,” Mr Ofosu-Dorte who is also the Executive Chairman at AB & David Law said.
He also suggested that voter ID cards of citizens must be converted into bank accounts to help decrease the unbanked population in the country.
He said one of the easiest ways to increase the tax net is to convert voter IDs and Mobile Money accounts of people without bank accounts into bank accounts to solve the problem.
“If we want to increase the banking population…we could convert voters IDs into bank accounts with zero accounts. It can be done because that is what Mauritius does. Instead of doing that, we have done things that have been detrimental to us,” Ofosu-Dorte said at the University of Professional Studies Law School in Accra (UPSA).
Mr Ofosu-Dorte added “we should not have used the E-levy as a means to tax Momo. We should have used momo as a basis for opening bank accounts for everybody to have a bank account to make it easy for GRA to track how much you earn and come after you.”
