Richard Nyamah of the Progressive Nationalist Forum (PNF), a pressure group aligned to the opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP), has issued a 72-hour ultimatum to the current Mahama administration to pay the Ghana Education Trust Fund (GETFUND) component of the Valued Added Tax (VAT) or risk being dragged to the court.
�I have observed that contrary to the GETFUND Act 200, Act 581 under section 4, subsection 2 which states that the Value Added Tax Service shall within 30 days of receipt of value added tax revenue pay directly into the bank accounts opened under subsection 1 the proportion of the value added tax revenue is required to be paid into the fund under section 3 (a), the government has since January 2013 failed to make good its obligations to the fund,� he said in a statement released on Monday.
�The GETFUND is one of the major sources of funding education in Ghana and therefore any tinkering with the fund has a direct consequence on the quality of education in Ghana.�
According to Richard Nyamah, he had instructed his counsel, Solicitor Thaddeus Sory, to within three days from Monday, December 9, 2013 file �a suit in the court of law to retrieve all monies owed the fund by government since January 2013 and all interest accruing as a result of the non-payment.
Mr. Nyamah, who is also vying for the youth organiser position of the opposition NPP, hinted that the suit would be filed if the government fails to make any �concrete attempt� to make the said statutory payments to the GETFUND.
According to him, any judgment debt that may accrue as a result of his action should be directly blamed on the Minister of Finance because he had already given the Ministry, the Attorney-General and President Mahama the statutory 30-day notice prerequisite for filing such a lawsuit.
�The good people of Ghana, including myself, have met our tax obligations including the payment of the Value Added Tax, which is deducted mostly at source from us,� he charged.
By Raphael Ofori-Adeniran
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