By The Kasoa Economist
Only 1.2 million Ghanaians currently pay tax. The informal sector employs 80% of the workforce and contributes barely 30% of GDP. More than half of all VAT due is never collected. GRA collected GH₵ 33.7 billion in Q1 2026, which is a 20% increase that proves compliance can improve. But the Commissioner-General of the GRA has named what enforcement, technology, and legislation cannot fix on their own: communication. Ghana’s tax gap is, in substantial part, a journalism problem.
Ask a seamstress in Kumasi whether she pays income tax and she will likely answer one of three things: that she did not know she was supposed to; that she tried once and the process defeated her; or that she paid a GRA officer who came to her shop, received no receipt, and assumed that was the end of it. Ask a mechanic in Sunyani whether he files a tax return and the most honest answer you will get is that he has never heard of the Modified Taxation Scheme, does not know what a TIN number is, and has not seen any reason to acquire one. These are not unusual answers. They are the norm. Ghana’s Ghana Revenue Authority has a taxpayer base of 1.2 million active payers in a country of more than 35 million people, a working population of perhaps 15 million, and an informal sector that employs eight in every ten workers. The arithmetic of that gap is not a mystery. It is a policy failure with a specific, addressable cause: most Ghanaians who are legally obligated to pay tax have never received a clear, credible, and locally relevant explanation of what they owe, why they owe it, and what it will be used for.
On 20th November 2025, GRA Commissioner-General Anthony Kwasi Sarpong addressed editors and members of the GRA Press Corps in Accra. His message was direct and, for a tax authority commissioner, unusually candid about what his institution cannot do alone. The evolving tax environment. such as forthcoming amendments to the VAT Act, the Income Tax Act, and the Customs Act; the rollout of the Modified Taxation Scheme for the informal sector; the digital economy tax pilot capturing VAT on online purchases and crypto-asset gains, would only succeed, he said, if taxpayers fully understood what was being asked of them and why. “If we do not explain the reforms in simple terms and create the necessary awareness,” he said, “it becomes difficult for people to voluntarily comply.” He described journalists not as conduits for GRA press releases but as “an essential extension of the Authority’s sustained tax education campaign.” He appealed to them to serve as “ambassadors for tax education” in their reporting and daily interactions. That appeal was well-judged. It was also, if read carefully, an acknowledgement that Ghana’s tax compliance crisis is, in part, a communication failure of the first order.
1.2m
Active taxpayers out of 35m+ 19%
Income tax compliance rate 50%+
VAT gap — uncollected
THE SCALE OF WHAT IS NOT BEING COLLECTED
The compliance numbers are worth stating plainly because they have a tendency to be reported in isolation without the cumulative picture they form together. Only about 19% of Ghana’s taxpayer population pays income tax. Less than 30% of those registered for VAT comply with their VAT obligations. The informal sector accounts for roughly 80% of the country’s workforce but contributes only around 30% to GDP. This is a gap driven partly by the structural informality of small enterprise and partly by a compliance rate that the GRA’s own Area Director in Sunyani has put at approximately 30%, meaning 70% of informal sector workers are currently evading. GRA’s own estimate is that artisans alone (tailors, masons, mechanics, electricians, plumbers) would generate GH₵ 800 million annually if they met their obligations under existing law. The Modified Taxation Scheme targets GH₵10 billion in additional revenue from the informal sector as a whole. Ghana’s 2026 GRA revenue target is GH₵ 225–230 billion, roughly GH₵ 50 billion more than was collected in 2025. Q1 2026 collected GH₵ 33.7 billion, 20% above the same period last year. This proofs that compliance can improve. The gap between what is being collected and what the law requires to be paid is not a rounding error. It is a structural wound in Ghana’s public finances that shows up, downstream, as unpaid NHIS claims, unbuilt roads, and school feeding arrears.
Ghana’s tax-to-GDP ratio of 13.6% in 2025 is the most damning single statistic in this story. The sub-Saharan African average is approximately 17%. The OECD average is 34%. Ghana is a lower-middle-income economy with an ambitious development agenda, an IMF programme anchored on fiscal consolidation, and a public that expects roads, hospitals, schools, and social protection. The arithmetic of those expectations against a 13.6% revenue base does not work. It has never worked. Every fiscal crisis Ghana has experienced, from the 2022 debt distress, the 2014 IMF programme, the recurring NHIS reimbursement failures, to the GETFUND structural overreach into Free SHS recurrent costs, has its roots, in part, in the same place: a state that has promised more than its tax base can finance, because its tax base has been allowed to remain far below its potential for decades.
TAX HEAD COMPLIANCE REALITY WHAT IT COSTS GHANA
Income Tax 19%compliance rate 81% of income tax potential uncollected
VAT <30% compliance rate More than 50% of VAT due is not collected
Informal sector 80% of workforce Only 30% contribution to GDP; 70% evade
Artisans alone Tailors, masons, mechanics, etc GH₵ 800m annually if they met obligations
Total taxpayer base 1.2 million active payers Ghana population: 35 million+ (2026)
Tax-to-GDP 13.6% (2025) Sub-Saharan Africa average: 17%; OECD: 34%
WHY PEOPLE DO NOT PAY: THE COMMUNICATION GAP
The academic and policy literature on tax compliance in developing economies consistently identifies three proximate causes of non-payment: inability to pay, unwillingness to pay, and inability to comply even when willing. The third cause — what economists call compliance costs — is the one most relevant to Ghana’s informal sector and the one most directly addressable through communication. A 2026 policy forum hosted by the Centre for Policy Scrutiny heard from GRA Technical Advisor Elsie Appau-Klu that Ghana’s primary compliance challenge is not the absence of new taxes but the low compliance rates within the existing tax framework. The system, she argued, had historically been complex, intimidating, and opaque. This generates a rational non-compliance response from small businesses whose owners lacked the accounting capacity, legal literacy, and administrative bandwidth to navigate it. The Modified Taxation Scheme’s central design principle (a 3% flat rate on turnover for businesses earning up to GH₵ 500,000 annually) is a direct response to that diagnosis. Make compliance as simple as a mobile money transfer, and more people will comply.
But simplifying the system and communicating that simplification are two different things. The GRA’s Sustained Tax Education programme, its 24-hour WhatsApp response system, its nationwide sensitisation forums, and its three-year national tax education strategy are all welcome investments. They reach, by the GRA’s own evidence, a fraction of the people they need to reach. A sensitisation forum in Sunyani that trains 40 artisans on the MTS platform is valuable. It covers roughly 0.003% of the informal sector workers who need that training. The GRA cannot run ten thousand sensitisation forums simultaneously. It does not have the staff, the budget, or the logistics. What it has is a media landscape of more than 400 licensed FM radio stations broadcasting in every major Ghanaian language, reaching into every district, every market, every trading community in the country every day. The question is whether those stations are using that reach to carry the message that needs to be carried.
“Accountability comes with responsibility. When citizens contribute through taxes, they are better positioned to demand transparency and proper use of public funds.”
— Elsie Appau-Klu, Technical Advisor, GRA Commissioner-General, April 2026
WHAT TAX JOURNALISM IN GHANA CURRENTLY LOOKS LIKE
Ghana has a rich tradition of political journalism and a growing investigative reporting sector. It has organisations like the Ghana Integrity Initiative, the Ghana Anti-Corruption Coalition, and investigative units within major newsrooms doing serious accountability work. What it does not have, in adequate depth or consistency, is a tradition of tax journalism, thus, reporting that treats the revenue side of public finance with the same rigour and public interest framing that it applies to the spending side. When a government contract is inflated, the story runs. When a politician steals public money, the story runs. When GH₵ 10 billion in tax revenue fails to materialise because 70% of the informal sector is non-compliant and the compliance infrastructure is understaffed and under-resourced, the story is rarely told, and when it is, it is rarely told in a way that connects the uncollected cedi to the unbuilt school.
The structural reasons for this gap are not difficult to identify. Tax reporting is technically demanding: understanding the difference between VAT gap analysis and income tax compliance requires familiarity with fiscal policy concepts that most journalism programmes in Ghana do not teach. A third of Ghana’s media outlets are owned by politicians or persons with ties to political parties, and the content they produce is, by Reporters Without Borders’ own assessment, largely partisan and oriented toward political accountability rather than fiscal citizenship. Most journalists are underpaid and under-resourced, operating in newsrooms that cannot support the sustained, source-building, data-driven approach that effective fiscal reporting requires. And there is a specific inhibitor unique to tax journalism: the GRA is both the subject of the reporting and, through its press corps and media engagement programme, a primary source and funder of journalist training in the area. That relationship is not inherently corrupting, but it requires careful navigation that not all newsrooms are equipped to provide.
The RSF Press Freedom Index notes a growing trend of self-censorship in Ghana’s media landscape, and journalists covering extractive industries ( the sector most directly linked to tax evasion at scale) face documented physical risks. Three environmental journalists were attacked in March 2025 while reporting on illegal mining in the Western Region. The investigative journalist Ahmed Hussein-Suale was murdered in 2019; six years later, the investigation has, by the President’s own acknowledgement, not been resolved. A journalism profession that operates under these conditions will rationally calibrate its risk appetite toward lower-stakes reporting. Tax compliance, presented as a civic responsibility story rather than a corruption story, sits in a safer space than investigative reporting on gold smuggling networks. However, it requires the same underlying fiscal literacy and the same willingness to pursue institutional sources that are sometimes reluctant to share unflattering compliance data.
THE CASE FOR TAX JOURNALISM AS DEVELOPMENT PRACTICE
The theoretical connection between public communication and tax compliance is well-established in the fiscal sociology literature. James Alm’s work on tax morale demonstrates that voluntary compliance is driven not primarily by the fear of detection but by the perceived fairness of the tax system, the quality of public services received in exchange, and the social norm of compliance among peers. All three of those determinants are, in significant part, shaped by what people hear, read, and believe about their tax system — which is to say, they are shaped by journalism. A Ghanaian informal sector worker who has never been told that her tax payment funds the Community Health Planning and Services compound in her district, who has never seen a news story connecting road construction to domestic revenue, and who has no social proof from her peers and neighbours that compliance is normal rather than exceptional, will not comply. She is not making an irrational choice. She is responding correctly to the information environment she inhabits.
The GRA’s own pivot toward service-based rather than enforcement-based tax administration acknowledges this dynamic explicitly. Commissioner-General Sarpong has said that the Authority is building a “human face” into tax administration because “voluntary cooperation is central to effective revenue collection.” The MTS’s design principle is a communication strategy as much as an administrative one. The three-year national tax education strategy and the GRA Working Group established to craft it are institutional investments in the idea that changing tax behaviour requires changing tax knowledge and tax attitudes, not merely changing tax rates. All of this is correct. And all of it stops at the boundary of what the GRA can do with its own budget and staff. Beyond that boundary, the media must take over. The GRA has 400 FM stations available to carry its message to every corner of Ghana. It is using, by any honest estimate, a fraction of that reach.
SIX THINGS EFFECTIVE TAX JOURNALISM DOES
► Demystify the tax code
The Modified Taxation Scheme’s three categories, such as PTI, PTT, and MCB, are simple in design and incomprehensible by name. A journalist who explains in Twi, Dagbani, Hausa, or Ewe that a tailor earning GH₵ 50,000 a year pays 3% ( GH₵1,500) has done more for compliance than a hundred GRA press releases.
► Connect tax to visible services
Ghanaians who can see that their taxes built the road, funded the hospital, or supplied the school meal are more likely to pay voluntarily. Journalism that traces a public expenditure back to its revenue source, and a compliance failure forward to its service consequence, creates the feedback loop that enforcement alone cannot.
► Expose fraud and leakage
Tax compliance is undermined not only by non-payment but by the perception that payments are wasted. Investigative reporting on NHIA fraud, inflated government contracts, and GRA corruption weakens that excuse while building the social contract. The two roles are not in tension: holding the government accountable for spending is itself a tax compliance intervention.
► Report in local languages
More than 80% of Ghana’s informal sector workers do not consume news in English. Radio in Twi, Dagbani, Ga, Ewe, Hausa, and Fante reaches the trader at Kantamanto, the artisan in Sunyani, the food vendor at Makola. Tax education that lives only in English-language newspapers and breakfast TV does not reach the people it is designed to reach.
► Platform the compliant
A tailor in Kumasi who proudly paid her Modified Taxation Scheme levy and is expanding her business is a more powerful compliance argument than any enforcement story. Journalism that celebrates visible, relatable, successful taxpayers creates social proof that compliance is normal and rational, not exceptional and punitive.
► Ask the budget questions
Every road not built, every school not stocked, every NHIS claim not paid is, in part, a consequence of uncollected revenue. Journalists, who connect budget shortfalls to compliance gaps and who ask ministers not only where the money went but where it failed to arrive, are performing the most direct form of development journalism available.
WHAT EFFECTIVE TAX COMMUNICATION LOOKS LIKE IN PRACTICE
There are models from which Ghana can learn. In Rwanda, the Rwanda Revenue Authority has developed a systematic media engagement programme that trains broadcast journalists annually in fiscal reporting, provides embargoed budget materials to selected outlets 48 hours before publication to enable accurate coverage, and operates a dedicated taxpayer communications unit that produces translated radio content in Kinyarwanda for rural audiences. The result is a media landscape in which budget day is covered as a development story rather than a political spectacle, and in which compliance messaging reaches farmers, traders, and informal workers in language and formats they actually consume. Rwanda’s tax-to-GDP ratio, which stood at approximately 15% five years ago, is now approaching 18% (a trajectory Ghana), with a comparable economy and a far larger media ecosystem, has not been able to sustain.
In Kenya, the Kenya Revenue Authority’s partnership with community radio stations in Kiswahili and vernacular languages has been credited with significant increases in self-assessment compliance among informal sector operators. The key insight behind those programmes is one that Ghana’s media landscape is well-positioned to apply: tax compliance messages that resonate in local languages, delivered by trusted voices in specific communities, and connected to visible local development outcomes are more persuasive than any centralised English-language campaign. A Dagbani radio presenter explaining the Modified Taxation Scheme to market traders in Tamale, connecting the 3% levy to the new market stalls being constructed in the district, and interviewing a trader who registered and found the process simpler than expected, is delivering a compliance intervention that no GRA enforcement operation can replicate.
The Network of Financial and Tax Reporters in Ghana is an important institutional foundation for this work. The GRA’s media engagement programme including its annual press corps briefings and the provision of simplified tax documentation for journalists, is a useful starting point. But the training gap is significant. A survey of working journalists in Ghana would likely find that the majority cannot explain the difference between a direct and indirect tax, do not know what a tax-to-GDP ratio is or why it matters, and have never written a story that connected an uncollected tax to an undelivered public service. That is not a criticism of individual journalists. It is a structural observation about a professional training ecosystem that has not invested adequately in fiscal literacy as a core journalistic competency. The GRA’s Working Group on the three-year tax education strategy should include media capacity development as a funded, mandatory component, not a courtesy invitation to editors, but a sustained, assessed, and resourced programme to build the corps of financially literate reporters that Ghana’s development journalism requires.
THE DEVELOPMENT DIVIDEND THAT COMPLIANCE MAKES POSSIBLE
The numbers at the end of this argument are worth stating directly, because they are large enough to change the terms of Ghana’s development debate. If Ghana’s tax-to-GDP ratio rose from 13.6% to the sub-Saharan African average of 17%, not to the OECD level, not to some aspirational ceiling, but simply to the average of its peer group, the additional revenue at 2025 GDP levels would amount to approximately $2.5–3 billion per year. That is roughly twice Ghana’s annual infrastructure financing gap. It would fully fund the National Health Insurance Scheme without structural deficits. It would pay the Free SHS feeding programme from the Consolidated Fund, as it should be, without cannibalising GETFund’s capital mandate. It would fund the cold-chain infrastructure that would stop northern farmers watching their rice rot in warehouses. It would build the emergency beds that Charles Amissah needed and could not find.
None of that requires new taxes. All of it requires collecting the taxes Ghana already imposes, from the people and businesses that are already legally obligated to pay them but have been allowed, through a combination of administrative weakness, complexity, and inadequate communication, to opt out without consequence. The GRA’s 2026 Year of Compliance is a recognition that the existing legal framework is sufficient, if compliance with it improves. The Modified Taxation Scheme’s 3% flat rate for the informal sector is a recognition that the compliance cost barrier must be lowered. The Commissioner-General’s appeal to the media is a recognition that lowering the barrier is not enough if the people who need to walk through it have never been shown where the door is.
That last recognition is where journalists and media houses enter the story not as amplifiers of GRA messaging but as development actors in their own right. The seamstress in Kumasi who does not know she owes 3% of her GH₵ 50,000 turnover is not a tax evader. She is an uninformed citizen in a country that has not invested adequately in telling her what it needs from her and what it will give her in return. A journalist who tells her in Twi, on a radio station she listens to while she sews, in a story that connects her small payment to the district road being repaired outside her workshop, is not doing GRA’s job for it. She is doing journalism’s job: connecting citizens to the systems that shape their lives, and giving those citizens the information they need to participate in those systems rather than stand outside them. Ghana cannot build its hospitals, fix its roads, pay its teachers, and fund its insurance scheme on 1.2 million taxpayers. It needs to tell the other 13 million working Ghanaians that they are part of the project. That is a journalism job. It is past time it was treated as one.
The GRA’s Q1 2026 collection of GH₵ 33.7 billion, 20% above Q1 2025 despite the abolition of three taxes, is the strongest available evidence that compliance can improve rapidly when the right conditions are in place. Those conditions include a simpler system, better service, digital infrastructure, and targeted enforcement. They also include a public that understands what the system asks of it. Building that understanding is not the GRA’s problem alone. It belongs to every newsroom, broadcaster, and journalist in Ghana that covers the country’s development. The GRA has extended a hand to the media. The question is whether the media has the training, the independence, and the institutional commitment to take it seriously.
THEORETICAL REFERENCES: Alm (1999, 2019) Tax morale & voluntary compliance · Allingham & Sandmo (1972) Tax evasion model · Levi (1988) Of Rule and Revenue — fiscal social contract theory · Schumpeter (1918) fiscal sociology · Norris & Inglehart (2018) Cultural evolution & civic norms
KEY SOURCES: GRA Technical Advisor, CPS Forum (7 Apr 2026) — Sikaman Times · GRA Modified Taxation Scheme — MyJoyOnline / The Herald (Apr 2026) · GRA Commissioner-General, Press Corps Address (20 Nov 2025) — The Herald / Ghanaian Times · GRA 2026 ‘Year of Compliance’ agenda — GhanaWeb (Mar 2026) · GRA Sunyani Sensitisation Forum — NewsGhana (Nov 2025) · RSF Ghana Press Freedom 2026 · Emmanuel Dogbevi — Reuters Institute (2026)
TOPICS: Tax Compliance · GRA · Modified Taxation Scheme · Informal Sector · Tax Journalism · Development Finance · Ghana Revenue · Tax-to-GDP · Media & Civic Responsibility
Ghana Development Watch — Special Edition by The Kasoa Economist. Published outside the regular schedule in response to a pressing national development issue.
