Tax expert and consultant Abdallah Ali-Nakyea has opposed any move or attempt to scrap the COVID-19 Levy even though the disease is no longer a health threat globally.
The 1% levy was introduced by the government during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in Ghana to provide financial support in combating the virus and its effect.
Speaking at the just ended Vodafone Business Runway in Accra, Ali-Nakyea proposed a change in the name of the levy to help cater for challenges in the health sector.
“I have always held that, it is not a tax I wish should be scrapped, reason is that, remember when the government came into power, we all celebrated the scrapping of 16 tax types, today imagine the number of tax coming back, so it shows it wasn’t the right approach in the first place,” he said.
“We could have scrapped two, the following year two, gradually and so we would have been able to find other means. The reason I am saying this is that supposing we scrap COVID-19 Levy, today the challenges Korle Bu Teaching Hospital is having with dialysis, are we going to introduce dialysis levy?” he asked.
“So, I think the name given to it might have been the cause of the problem, we really have a lot of problems in the health sector, any revenue should be channeled to solve them,” Ali-Nakyea said.
Listen to Dr Abdallah Ali-Nakyea in the attached audio clip below:
Reporting by Fred Dzakpata in Accra
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