Development Economist, Dr. Michael Adongo is calling on the Finance Minister to be honest in his delivery to Ghanaians at the mid-year budget review that is expected to happen in Parliament later today, Monday, July 25, 2022.
Dr. Adongo made this appeal when he spoke on A1 Radio’s Day Break Upper East Show.
“This budget is going to be one we expect to be a truthful one because for all these years, the Finance Minister has been sugarcoating the budget, hiding his presentations in funny footnotes and a series of opaque entries but the reality has now caught up with us. I expect the budget to lay bare our woes.”
“The mid-year budget is normally put in place to ensure that if our projections change, if our revenue situations change, we could make some short-term changes to the budget,” he said.
He said the government must reconcile its expectations and projections with the current revenue shortfalls.
“You would notice that we had a lot of expectations regarding the e-levy. The e-levy did not materialise the way we thought it would. There is a lot of revenue shortfall there. We expected to be able to improve our outlook in the capital market, especially with the implementation of the e-levy, and that was supposed to create room for us to borrow. There was even the intention to collateralise the e-levy in order to get other sources of loans to improve our ability to borrow. The e-levy was not only a source of revenue for the government directly but a means of improving the government’s access to revenues elsewhere.”
Meanwhile, the Monitoring and Evaluation Officer at the Chamber of Petroleum Consumers (COPEC) has called on the Minister for Finance, Ken Ofori Atta to take the opportunity the mid-year budget review presents to remove some of the taxes on the petroleum price buildup.
Also, ahead of the Mid-year Budget review to be read in Parliament today by the Minister for Finance, Ken Ofori Atta, the Executive Secretary for the Importers and Exporters Ghana (IEAG) is wondering what has become of the government’s manifesto promise to redefine Ghana’s economy and move it from one that taxation based to a highly industrialized on that is production based.
Source: A1radioonline.com|101.1MHz|Mark Kwasi Ahumah Smith|Ghana
