Vice President, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia says government will by the end of this year, convert all National Identification Numbers to Tax Identification Numbers, to increase the taxpaying population.

According to him, the move expected to increase the tax population by some already existing 2 million registered taxpayers to 16 million registered taxpayers by the end of this year.

Currently, less than 2 million people registered to pay taxes. By the end of this year, we will start converting all the National Identification Numbers into Tax Identification Numbers, which means we will increase the number of people registered for taxes up from about 2 million to close to 16 million in one year.

Lending rates often high partly because of the high information problems in establishing identity, verifying income sources, and ownership problems. These have to change if we’re aspiring to be a middle-income country. We have embarked on leveraging on technology to overcome many of our developmental problems; and, to formalize this informal economy, this is what digitization going to allow us to do in bringing people into the tax net, he added.

Dr. Bawumia said this at the launch of the Absa Bank Ghana Limited on Monday, February 10, in Accra. The Vice President also disclosed that the Ministry of Finance in the next few months will launch a portal for the delivery of all government services digitally. The portal dubbed; ‘Ghana.Gov’ platform will strive for the efficiency of the public sector, provide easy access and convenience for citizens, and curb revenue linkages.