Takoradi: Mr Edward Cudjoe, from the Economic and Organized Crime Office (EOCO), has appealed to the government to strengthen relevant institutions to collect taxes due from citizens. He believed it would increase revenue, and the government would be able to invest in sectors like infrastructure, health, and education, among others. He said regulations pertaining to investment and payment of taxes due to the country should be strictly enforced, ‘Let’s ensure that people pay the right taxes on gold and other valuable resources’.
According to Ghana News Agency, ‘It’s essential to ensure that people are not sending their profits out of the jurisdiction and under declaring them.’
‘All these must be done, and the laws are there. With the right people and resources, we can generate the taxes needed to build the country we all envision,’ he added. Mr Cudjoe said this in Takoradi during a two-day training workshop organized by Media Foundation for West Africa, Oxfam in Ghana, and DANIDA on Illicit Financial Flows (IFF’s) and progressive taxation, under the Strategic Partnership Initiative for Ghana in West Africa. Twenty journalists from the Western and Western North Regions benefited from this training.
He said IFF was the movement used for the transfer of funds from one jurisdiction to another and this could be done through corruption, tax evasion, money laundering, and misdescription of goods that have been imported. ‘So, either they are under declaring or over declaring, or they are misdescribing what has been imported, just in a way, to pay less tax,’ Mr Cudjoe noted.
Mr Paul Gozo, Programme Assistant Under the Media for Democracy and Good Governance Programme at the MFWA explained that Ghana lost billions of dollars annually due to IFF’s. This loss, coupled with a weak tax system and low revenue mobilization, severely limits the government’s ability to generate sufficient funds to invest in important projects. He said, ‘beyond this, journalists do not have the capacity to adequately investigate and report on these issues, and so it goes unnoticed to affect the country.’
To address the knowledge gap, Mr Gozo stressed that MFWA, Oxfam, and DANIDA joined forces to equip journalists with the expertise needed to thoroughly investigate and report on IFF’s. In addition to the training, they would support these journalists to produce impactful stories that could help combat IFF’s in Ghana. To achieve this goal, they have planned to train a total of eighty journalists. In December 2024, twenty journalists were trained in the Northern Region. Another twenty journalists have also been trained in the Western Region.
The team would also head to Akosombo, where twenty journalists from the Volta and Eastern Regions would undergo the same training. They would finalize the training in Kumasi, targeting 20 journalists from the Ashanti Region. This move would help create a core group of journalists equipped to report on IFF’s in Ghana.