Chief Executive Officer of the Chamber of Telecommunications, Dr Kenneth Ashigbey, has revealed that the Chamber requires to see what has been passed with respect to the e-levy by government.

Dr Ashigbey noted that currently, there is some level of doubt concerning how the E-levy will be implemented. This, he explained, is partly because the Chamber is yet to receive a copy of the final bill that was passed in Parliament on Tuesday, March 29, 2022, to know exactly how the law is intended to be implemented.

“So, we need to see what exactly has been passed and then be able to understand what GRA is going to implement”.
Dr Kenneth Ashigbey

Dr Ashigbey indicated that there has been engagement between the Chamber, Ministry of Finance and the GRA, and all of that was “predicated [on] when it is passed”, as they have had a lot of discussions at the technical level. Following this, he intimated that the GRA has some technical partners who are also working on creating a particular portal in order to aid the entire process.

The Chamber of Telco boss emphasized that he has been “trying to get even a copy” of the final bill that was passed by parliament to understand fully what actually has been passed but to no avail. Dr Ashigbey indicated that this is to ascertain the readiness of his team and ensure that they will be able to work on it.

Implementation of the e-levy

In some of the meetings that the Chamber engaged in, Dr Ashigbey intimated that there was supposed to be a “phased approach” with regards to the e-levy implementation to ensure the process isn’t cumbersome.

“… For example, if you take me that has about three accounts on all the networks, you’d need to find a way of identifying that it’s me on all of that. We all know that SIM registration has now been pushed using the Ghana Card to the end of July. So, till that is done, what we had advised and advocated was that you do it on a per wallet basis to be able to start because you’re going to compute that exemption of a 100 cedis”.
Dr Kenneth Ashigbey

Following this, Dr. Ashigbey expressed the Chamber’s resolve to commit to ensuring that the government’s implementation of the E-levy is successful, while also making sure that mobile money networks do not lose their traffic as a result. He revealed that he has seen the fliers that GRA has done in its quest to ensure that they’re mitigating a lot of things due to some “complexities” that have been introduced. Owing to this, he indicated that his outfit is looking at it to enable them proffer some recommendation to government.

“So, there’s a bit of uncertainty as to what we’re going to implement and we hope that our engagement with GRA and all of that, we will be able to understand what it is and then look at what is technically feasible as well. Because there are changes [and] there are settings that have to be done to be able to do this”.
Dr Kenneth Ashigbey