Honorary Vice President of IMANI Africa, Bright Simons, has stated that the services of the Strategic Mobilisation Limited (SML) were unnecessary.
According to him, the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA) and SML contract required the latter to, among other things, verify if the prices of goods importers presented to the Revenue Authority were the exact cost on the market.
This was expected to help the GRA determine how much taxes should be charged on the goods and help in revenue mobilisation.
However, he said the KPMG report revealed that the country paid an amount of $15 million to $16 million for the service which could have been gotten at a cheaper rate on the open market.
Speaking on JoyNews' Newsfile on May 25, he explained that the service was completely unnecessary.
“In the KPMG report, we learned that some of the services that SML provided particularly, the ones to do with trying to prevent importers from lying about the prices of the goods that they buy which will affect the duty and trying to prevent GRA officers from lying about the right duty they should impose, those services were being charged at an astronomical cost.
“We ended up paying over $15 million, nearly $16 million. When in fact you have alternatives on the open market which could have cost us barely $20,000. We ended up paying nearly $16 million for this company to apparently help us to prevent importers from lying about the prices of the goods they bought overseas to sell in this country, when we could just subscribe to commercial data bases and paid less than $20,000 or less for the same information,” he said.
Bright Simons added that several other procedures adopted by SML were unnecessary and yielded no results.
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Credit: Connielove Mawutornyo Dzodzegbe