By Adnan Adams Mohammed
Every morning at Makola Market, trader Akosua Mensah opens her fabric stall surrounded by the vibrant buzz of Accra’s commercial heart.
She takes pride in doing business the right way, paying her suppliers, keeping manual ledgers, and striving to meet her national obligations. Yet, until recently, fulfilling those obligations meant stepping into a maze of fragmented bureaucracy.
“In the past, ensuring full tax compliance meant hours spent traveling between different offices and managing stacks of paper files,” Mensah recalls. “One process for VAT, another for withholding tax each handled at different counters with no single place to see what you owed or what you had paid. It took critical time away from running the stall.”
Mensah’s long-standing frustration points to a systemic challenge the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA) is now actively dismantling. Through the introduction of its Integrated Tax Administration System (ITAS), the GRA is executing a fundamental shift: moving away from decades of disconnected legacy processes and toward a unified, taxpayer-centric digital portal.
The multi-year journey to ITAS reflects a deliberate drive toward modernizing Ghana’s domestic tax landscape, supporting the national ambition to raise the tax-to-GDP ratio to 20%. Rather than building separate systems for different tax types, the GRA partnered with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to procure a single, commercial-off-the-shelf platform capable of managing the full taxpayer lifecycle from registration and filing to auditing and refunds.
“It is the digital equivalent of consolidating multiple bank accounts across different branches into a single online view,” explains a spokesperson for the GRA’s Public Education & Media Relations Unit. “ITAS replaces a fragmented landscape with one secure profile for every taxpayer, bringing real-time transparency to domestic tax administration.”
The platform is currently undergoing a phased rollout. Following an initial launch at the Kaneshie Taxpayer Service Centre on 1 April 2026, the pilot was expanded to include selected entities within the Large Taxpayer Office, initially focusing on four key tax types: Pay As You Earn (PAYE), Value Added Tax (VAT), VAT Withholding, and Withholding VAT.
For tax administrators, the upgrade provides critical visibility into compliance trends and risk management, allowing enforcement teams to operate with data-driven precision rather than broad administrative sweeps.
“By adopting risk-based compliance and real-time data processing, ITAS allows us to focus our resources where risk is genuinely high, while providing a seamless, paperless experience for compliant citizens,” says a senior official with the GRA’s Domestic Tax Revenue Division.
Crucially, tax authorities are emphasizing that this technological evolution alters the delivery mechanism of public finance, not the underlying fiscal policy.
“It is critical for the public to understand that ITAS does not introduce new taxes or increase existing rates,” clarifies a Lead Project Coordinator for the ITAS Implementation Team. “It simply modernises how existing taxes are filed, paid, and tracked. As we gradually expand the pilot to integrate with the National Identification Authority and the Office of the Registrar of Companies, ITAS will set a new benchmark for public sector efficiency.”
Back at Makola Market, the human impact of that efficiency is clear. For taxpayers like Mensah, the transition to self-service digital channels means fewer hours lost to queues and more time spent contributing to the local economy.
“A simplified platform where we can check balances and file returns online gives small business owners clarity,” Mensah says. “When the process is straightforward, doing your part for the country feels less like a burden and more like a shared investment.”
