Finance and Economics lecturer, Professor Godfred Bokpin, has advised the government to review its decision against the new Value Added Tax (VAT) regime in the 2023 Budget and Economic Policy.
He called on government to reverse its decision as the state could generate more revenue if there was efficiency and digitalization deployment in the process.
Per his analysis, he termed the new VAT regime unnecessary as other countries with similar tax system were generating more revenue without increasing the rate.
“Now if we look at our revenue generation from VAT the problem has been inefficiency. Some countries with the same tax rate are doing more than 60% revenue compared to our 44%. This means that there is some level of inefficiency, meaning that we could still generate more tax revenue from VAT actually without increasing the rate but rather focusing on compliance and efficiency underpinned by administrative reform and deployment of digitization,” he said on Joy FM’s Super Morning Show.
He tagged the policy as a lazy man approach by the government to generate more revenue to support its projects and digitalization agenda in the country.
“We have rather decided to go for the lazy approach which is increasing the rate which will just affect the faithful few,” he added.
 regime in the 2023 Budget and Economic Policy.){kind=link}