The Guyana Revenue Authority (GRA) received $225.99 billion in revenue for 2019 – an increase of $27.4 billion from the previous year.
This was disclosed by Commissioner General of the agency, Godfrey Statia at a press conference Friday.
Statia said this is due to an expanding tax base and payment of monies owed to the entity. A total of $5.08 billion in arrears was paid over to the GRA between January and December 2019.
The GRA noted that it has seen an increasing revenue total from 2016 to 2019. The revenue received in 2016 was $151.75B compared to last year’s total.
In a breakdown later released to the media, the GRA said: “this increase is as a result of significant improvements in tax administrative efficiency and tax reforms initiate by the GRA and not as a result of the introduction of any new tax measure and thereby a burden on the taxpaying public.”
Personal income tax amounted to $28.30B.
Value Added and Excise Tax collection for 2019 accounted for $52,748,577 and $43,828,201, respectively.
A total of $29.12B of the Excise Tax collected came from petroleum products.
Total income tax collected from self-employed taxpayers amounted to $6.08B, 3.1% below the collections in the same category for 2018.
Corporation tax collected from the private sector from January to December 2019 totalled $34.05B – the payment came from 898 companies, -, an increase from 819 in 2018.
Withholding tax for the period amounted to $22.15B.
“The high collection and positive variances resulted mainly from three companies within the oil and gas sector making significant increased remittances. The total remittances from these entities accounted for $13.6B or 61% of the total Withholding Tax collection” for the year, the revenue body said.
In 2019, the country’s Gross Domestic Product stood at $924.60B.
For 2020, the agency is looking to collect $243.97B in taxes- an increase of $20.34B or 9.12% above the approved budget for 2019 and $17.98B above the actual collections for 2019.
