The Communication Ministry says Government has saved some GHC1.5 billion in under-declared taxes in the telecommunications sector since the implementation of the Common Platform (CP) in 2017.
Mrs. Ursula Owusu Ekuful, Minister of Communication, made this revelation as she answered questions on the Parliament floor. Indicating, “an estimated amount of GHC 300 million in taxes was also saved between the first quarter of 2017 to date as a result of the announcement of the implementation of the CP on March 8th, 2017”.
“The introduction of the CP has uncovered that, prior to the introduction of the policy, GHC 470 million in taxes was lost from potential under declarations between 2015 to the first quarter of 2017”, she added.
Mrs. Ursula Owusu Ekuful
Deployment of the Common Platform (CP) according to Mrs. Owusu-Ekuful tagged with sophisticated and up-to-date fraud management systems has recorded some 150,000 international calls into the country every month, thereby detecting fraudulent SIMs automatically.
To this end, she said, the swift decision has saved the country of tax fraud of an additional GHC 327.3 million from the activities of SIM Card fraud since the inception of the CP in 2017.
“Over the life of the contract, the CP is expected to deliver tax savings of approximately GHC 799.6 million”.
On the issue of Mobile Money Monitoring, the Communication Minister disclosed that the Common Platform has reported monthly usage for July 2020 of GHC 63.6 billion, 307.1 million transactions, with GHC 104.6 million generated by the Operators in operation fees, with further analyses of transaction types for informed policy decision making.
Highlighting on some key benefits, she indicated that the employment of the CP, coupled with the policy undertaken, has spiraled into action the accumulation of $1.1 million monthly in juxtaposition to the previous contracts. This has resulted in a total of $66 million savings over the 5-year contract period.
The NCA, the communication minister explained currently pays an amount of $596,490, with the GRA also paying $894,735, making a total of $1,491,225 to service providers.
“Additionally, unlike the previous contracts, the CP offers real time monitoring of 2.5 billion transactions per day within the telecom sector such as calls, SMS, Mobile money transactions and other transactions”.
Under Section 14 of the Communications Services Tax Act 2008 (Act 754), as amended by Section 7 of the Communications Service Tax (Amendment) Act, 2013, Act 864 mandates the Minister for Finance and the Minister for Communications to establish a common platform as a mechanism for verifying the actual revenues that accrue to service providers for the purpose of computing taxes due to government under Act 864, and revenues accruing from levies under Act 775 as amended by Act 786 of 2009.
In furtherance to this, KelniGVG was contracted on 27th December, 2017 to build and operate a Common Monitoring Platform (CMP), which is an integrated single platform connecting to nodes in the networks of all Mobile Network Operators (MNOs), and the Interconnect Clearinghouse (ICH) where traffic and revenues can be monitored.
Essentially, the Common Platform thrives on four major mechanisms, which includes, fraud management, traffic Monitoring, revenue assurance & mobile money monitoring
The National Communications Authority (NCA) and the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA), are the implementing agencies and beneficiaries of this project.
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