Chief Executive Officer of the Ghana National Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Mark Aboagye, says adding more taxes to an already tax-burdened economy will be counter-productive to revenue generation.
According to him, the government’s introduction of new tax measures to ramp up revenue generation is anti-business and should it be passed would collapse many businesses.
Thursday in parliament, the government’s new tax measures had not been passed following an impasse between the Majority and Minority side of parliament concerning the course of proceedings.
The tax measures form part of conditionalities for the country to receive the International Monetary Fund’s Executive Board approval for a $3billion bailout.
Speaking on JoyNews’ PM Express Business Edition, Mark Aboagye said he was extremely happy the tax measures were not passed and has called for them to be withdrawn from the house for wider consultation.
“Extremely happy, extremely excited because those taxes are anti-business, and I have no doubt in my mind that if it’s passed it’s going to cause the collapse of a lot of businesses, and businesses are going to produce under capacity. If you look at the environment and already the taxes that we have, adding up was going to be harsh for businesses so we’re happy that it’s not been passed.
“I hope that they’ll withdraw it and consult, engage the business people, find out the impact of the previous taxes on businesses and what possibly will be the impact of these taxes on businesses,” he said.
He explained that in the government’s quest to generate revenue, it was crushing the very industries that would provide the revenue.
He said, should the tax measures be passed, “it’s going to cause unemployment.”
“We’re killing the micro, the basics for us to get to all these macro policies to work, we’re weakening it. So for me, we’re happy it’s not being passed, they should withdraw it, consult the business community, the Chamber is ready to work with them, get them convinced that these taxes what extent are they going to impact on your businesses, [also] get their input into the taxes,” he said.
Mark Aboagye further bemoaned the failure of government to consult business stakeholders before introducing the new tax measures.
“In fact in our input to the budget, the 2023 budget, we made it clear that we’re already suffering, there’re a lot of taxes now so we’re not expecting that there will be an additional tax or there will be an increment of existing taxes, we made it clear. So we were not consulted, we just saw it in the budget,” he said.
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