Businesses should obtain Tax Identification Numbers (TIN) before they can benefit from the GH¢600 million stimulus package, the Executive Director of the National Board for Small Scale Industries (NBSSI) has said.

Government has earmarked GH¢600 million as stimulus package for small and medium scale enterprises (SMEs) to ease the pressure on them posed by the Covid-19.

But Madam Kosi Yankeh-Ayeh told Alfred Ocansey, the host of the Sunrise morning show on 3FM Thursday that ‘No TIN numbers, No stimulus’.

She assured the general public that her firm will be fair in the distribution of the GH¢600 million package.

She said the disbursements will be transparent with external auditors in place to audit the funds, hence no need to entertain fear of introducing partisan politics into the allocation.

Her comments come after the CEO of Dalex Finance, Ken Thompson, and others raised concerns that the NBSSI is too political to handle this assignment.

Mr Thompson suggested that the money should rather be given to financial institutions to handle and not the NBSSI.

He told TV3 on Monday, May 11 that: “[The NBSSI] suffers from the legacy of politics, it suffers from money going out and not being able to account because it was done on political basis.

“Why are we not working with the associations of non-bank financials? I have a problem with that?”

But the NBSSI boss told Alfred Ocansey that: “I can assure that there will be no partisan politics in this and the reason why we say that is that this is open and that is why we brought technology in.

“There will be external auditors as well. We don’t even know the beneficiaries. It is open so let us allow people to apply. What I challenge people to do is to actually show up with the data that is needed and fill the right data.”

She added: “People ask why NBSSI in this. We have been doing this for a long time but nobody has talked about politics but now that people see or hear of it then they assume.

“They are only assuming but let us not make the assumption. We have 178 offices in 178 districts called business advisory centres. We are in almost all the sixteen regional capitals, we provide the service, we have been doing it.”