It is always unpleasant to receive a letter from Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA) for the conduct of an audit and most companies wish to avoid that. However, this is inevitable, and you need to improve your tax compliance to avert tax risk. Nevertheless, I would be sharing our experience from the past 8years helping our valued clients undergoing tax audit by GRA. This will enable you to glean some insights to better understand and prepare for tax audit. In this post we will focus on steps to take when you receive the GRA letter for audit.
In this post we will focus on steps to
take when you receive the GRA letter for audit.
You need to immediately communicate this
development with your Tax Consultant (TC) or Auditor in case you do not have a
TC. Please remember that section 18 of the Revenue Administration Act 2016 (Act
915) indicates the following:
(1) For purposes of this Act, only a
person who is an approved tax consultant may
a. represent
a taxpayer;
b. provide
advice primarily regarding the interpretation or effect of a tax law; or
c. prepare
a tax return, appeal, or other document under a tax law.
(2) A person who is not an approved tax
consultant shall not
a. represent
that that person is a tax consultant; or
b. charge
fees to offer assistance with respect to the matters referred to in subsection
(1).
(3) Subsections (1) and (2) do not apply
to a lawyer performing legal work in relation to a tax law.
Your TC will sign the Power of Attorney
and they will engage GRA team directly during the tax audit process and
contestation. Do not bring in your TC when the GRA audit has been completed and
draft report issued. From our experience, GRA will often not entertain that as
this may be perceived as a strategy to delay the conclusion of the audit.
Now that you know exactly what to do when
you receive the tax audit letter from GRA, we will look at submission of
documents to GRA for audit purposes next week.