Principal Revenue Officer of the Ghana Revenue Authority (VRA), Alhaji Yakubu Anderson has reiterated the authority’s commitment to enhance tax collections through the introduction of the new invoicing system, E-VAT.
According to Mr. Anderson, the newly introduced E-VAT is an electronic process introduced to simplify the tedious invoicing routine using the manual process.
In an interview with Samuel Eshun on the Happy Morning Show, the VRA Principal Revenue Officer shared, “The E-VAT is about invoicing and we’ve made it E-VAT because we’re talking about the kind invoice that is VAT invoice. So before we introduced this it was mandatory for every business registered to being charging VAT to ensure that you issue the Commissioner General’s VAT Invoice and you don’t have any mandate to issue any other invoice. That was done manually through a booklet and was a very long process of calculations and stuff. Fortunately, we have done all these electronic and there’s no need for the tedious process. The system calculates it for you and that is what we call the electronic way or means of doing the invoice. So it’s basically an electronic invoicing shortened as the E-VAT.”
Highlighting the difference between the authority’s routine invigilation and the newly introduced E-VAT, Mr. Anderson indicated that the invigilation is a compliance tool to monitoring procedure while E-VAT is a “preemptive rerun”.
“The routine invigilation we do is similar but different in the sense that to some extent it is about invoicing but the difference is with the invigilation it is a compliance to monitoring while the certified e-voicing system is to actually monitor in real life the big companies who issue their own invoice system. So we’re not saying stop using your system but rather link it with our so that we can sit at the comfort of the office and monitor the transactions. We’ll get to a place where before the end of the month for the companies to bring in the tax we already know everything. So preemptive rerun and we have prepared everything already. So it there’s some little deviations and that we correct it and there’s the whole jurisdiction about the E-VAT,” he explained.