A map of the primary oil regions, and the companies that own those tracts, just offshore from the Western Region. Image sourced from here.Today's Accra Public Agenda reports on a two-day conference held in Takoradi that briefed civil-society organizations on the need to take an active role in reviewing the fiscal and institutional aspects of oil-revenue management before such revenues start accumulating in 2011. Emmanuel Kuyole of the Revenue Watch Institute led discussions and encouraged Ghanaian civil society to engage further with the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, a kind of international compact that lays out minimum standards for corporate and public-sector transparency on payments, revenues, costs and so forth.
One of the major problems for Ghana brought up in this story was lack of capacity, namely that of the Ghanaian Internal Revenue Service (IRS). I haven't had much interaction with Ghana's IRS, but with informal-sector employment hovering at 80-90 per cent, I am inclined to believe that the IRS isn't really able to as good a job as it could. My own fear is that the government will get lazy and not improve the IRS. As has happened in so many other oil-rich states, once the windfall comes in, taxation drops off. Without these taxes, the government loses the incentive to be efficient and the people lose the incentive to hold the government accountable. You can see the vicious circle that that leads to--a circle broken only by a price plunge and the devastating social, economic and political consequences that follow.
One of the major problems for Ghana brought up in this story was lack of capacity, namely that of the Ghanaian Internal Revenue Service (IRS). I haven't had much interaction with Ghana's IRS, but with informal-sector employment hovering at 80-90 per cent, I am inclined to believe that the IRS isn't really able to as good a job as it could. My own fear is that the government will get lazy and not improve the IRS. As has happened in so many other oil-rich states, once the windfall comes in, taxation drops off. Without these taxes, the government loses the incentive to be efficient and the people lose the incentive to hold the government accountable. You can see the vicious circle that that leads to--a circle broken only by a price plunge and the devastating social, economic and political consequences that follow.
No comments:
Post a Comment