THE Guyana Revenue Authority (GRA) has recorded a 14 per cent increase in its revenue collection for 2017, representing an estimated $20B more than what it had collected at the end of 2016, Commissioner-General Godfrey Statia told a news conference on Thursday.

Statia said the authority has been moving aggressively to collect taxes from defaulters and attributed this success to the collection of new taxes. The major revenue areas were collected from arrears which amounted to some $4B alone.

“We are targeting persons who owe us and have not been paying, so arrears collection has increased. It is a sizeable amount. We also look at certain taxes that were not previously collected.” said Statia, who noted that approximately $4B has been collected through arrears. Additionally, Statia also spoke of withholding taxes for non-residents.

“Persons actually never used to be taking that out and that actually brought us another $3B.”

However, while the authority has been successful in some respects last year, the commissioner-general said tax evasion continues to be a major challenge. He said, if the top 10,000 taxpayers pay their correct tax, that base would be widened to reduce taxes for the rest of the populace. Statia said too that 60 per cent of the revenues are based on just 300 taxpayers. Those include corporate tax and a few individual taxpayers.

“And those that are individual taxpayers, are persons who just because of the rate differential have elected to remove themselves from the corporate person into an individual person,” he added while reminding that corporate taxation with commercial entities is 40 per cent and 45 per cent is for telephone companies, while manufacturing companies stand at 27.5 per cent.

“As long as we get those persons doing what they are supposed to be doing, I am sure taxes will be improved,” he stated. That aside, Statia assured that most of the authority’s plans for 2017 are progressing smoothly. (DPI)