Officers of the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA) have detained managers of various notable retail centres in the Greater Accra area for generating phoney Value Added Tax (VAT) invoices.

The stores include Shoprite in the Junction Mall in Nungua as well as China Mall, Sneda Shopping Centre, Palace Mall, and Second Cup Coffee, all on the Spintex Road.

For tax evasion, managers of China Mall, Shoprite, and Palace Mall were detained.

A joint team from the Ghana Police Service’s Criminal Investigations Department (CID) and the GRA carried out the exercise.

The drills are a part of the GRA’s efforts to increase revenue mobilisation by upholding the law regarding taxes.

Edward Gyambrah, the GRA’s Commissioner for Domestic Revenue, revealed to journalists that some of the companies hired to test the computerised VAT system tampered with it and made it vulnerable.

“Some of these taxpayers who are supposed to be hooked on to the Commissioner General’s invoicing system are not fully complying with the directive and we realized that some were issuing invoices outside the system and this is an infraction of the law” Mr. Gyambrah said.

Mr. Gyambrah noted that the operations are a continuation of the Authority’s electronic VAT enrolment system, which was implemented in the fourth quarter of 2022