Commissioner-General of the Ghana Revenue Authority, Anthony Kwasi Sarpong, has urged Ghanaians to ask for Value Added Tax receipt on goods and services after each purchase in order that they can effectively track their tax contribution towards national development. The GRA boss has described the recent VAT reforms embarked on by the government as a ‘comprehensive’ policy measure that is aimed at improving tax compliance and collection in the country. The new VAT regime as passed by Parliament in November, 2025 seeks to revise and consolidate all the VAT laws in existence while correcting a number challenges and complexities identified under Act 870 and various amendments enacted over the years after 2013.
For Mr. Sarpong, the new revenue measures that have been introduced by the administration provide an opportunity for GRA to go an extra mile in enforcing compliance amongst individuals and businesses despite the reliefs for consumers with the abolition of the COVID-19 Health Recovery Levy among others. He was however confident in GRA’s capacity to meet the end-of-year revenue target of GH¢225 billion.
He noted, “As you are aware, the VAT reforms, it’s one of the comprehensive reforms the Ministry of Finance has implemented as a policy measure to improve our VAT collections and there are several policy measures that were introduced. One is abolishing the COVID-19 levy. Second was removing the decoupling. And then the third was ensuring that businesses and individuals can claim the entire input VAT, which previously about 6% of them was not claimable.”
“We believe that the reforms have been taken well by businesses and guardians, as of last week from Ghana Revenue Authority, we did market visits as well as visiting some of the major shops and were satisfied that most of the businesses have implemented the new VAT requirements. That in itself ensuring that consumers can benefit from the abolition of the levy, as well as also ensuring that government intention to make sure that the abolishment returns close to about 6 billion to households has begun.”
The Value Added Tax law passed on 26th November, 2025, according to a Finance Committee report sighted by CediTalk, “addresses the cascading effect of the current VAT regime by revising the existing legal framework of the tax regime”, while replacing the flat rate system with a single, clear structure and include a provision for increasing the VAT registration threshold from GH¢200,000 to GH¢ 750,000 to offer smaller businesses that do not have capacity to account for VAT to be exempt from registration. According to the Committee, implementation of the law which begun on January 1 this year will be “revenue neutral” as a result of increase in compliance and overall impact of the reforms on the economy.
Furthermore, as the population of Ghana increased, the demand for basic services from the State has gone high coupled with high consumption of goods therefore the introduction of these new VAT reforms would rather enhance collection for the provision of infrastructure and basic services to the citizenry. Mr. Sarpong then called on businesses and consumers pay taxes voluntarily under a collective effort to build the nation.
“On that score, we ask all consumers, anytime you purchase, just simply do one thing in the interest of the state, ask for your VAT receipt because when you do, it means that the money that you’ve paid that should go to government coffers to support development will certainly come to the coffers of government in our collective effort to build the nation,” he said.