GRA explains tax on bloggers and content creators

The Ghana Revenue Authority, GRA, following the success of its implementation of the betting tax is moving closer to taxing other online activities. Recently, advertisers were hit with a minimum of 21% tax on advertising meaning if you pay to promote your services or products online, you would have to pay taxes on the expenses to the government of Ghana.

Though the decision outraged many Ghanaians especially people who are involved in digital advertising. Patrons argued that the government is taxing their expenses even though they have not made profits from those expenses.

However, as if that is not enough and despite the backlashes that accompanied the imposition of taxes on betting earnings, the authority has hinted it is working on taxing content creators and bloggers. The Commissioner of the Domestic Tax Revenue Division of the revenue authority, Edward Gyambra, said the taxes were necessary as those people were generating income and were supposed to pay taxes on such earnings.

“Some people doing business online is something that is on the blog globally and if you remember last year, we also launched our e-commerce taxation and as part of getting online people to pay taxes all these players will be brought to book to ensure that they also pay their bit of taxes to the country.”

“We are expanding the tax net, and it doesn’t mean we are introducing a new tax. If you are generating income from any business, that income is taxable and so if you sit behind your computer and create content and generate income from that, we will tax that income,” he told Citi News.