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Common Platform saves government $1.1m monthly – Ursula

Source The Ghana Report/Sefanam Agbobli

Government says it is saving more than 1 million dollars monthly under the Common Platform meant to monitor the activities of Telcos than previous contracts.

Briefing journalists in Accra on Thursday on some gains made since the establishment of the platform, the Minister for Communications Ursula Owusu Ekuful said the platform is also expected to save some 66 million dollars at the end of the five-year period contract in operating the platform.

“From the gains mentioned above, the platform has provided more value to the state at a lesser amount compared to the previous contracts” she said.

The Minister stated that revenue vindicates government’s position to put in place the Common Platform to monitor the activities of Telco’s and to ensure they pay what is due the state.

Mrs. Owusu Ekuful revealed that beyond saving the state millions of dollars, the platform unlike the previous contracts offers real time monitoring of 2.5 billion transactions per day within the telecom sector which includes calls, SMS, Mobile Money transactions and monitoring as an added component.

Government commenced the monitoring of telecoms activities based on the establishment of the Common platform found in Section 14 of the Communications Services Tax Act 2008(Act 754) as amended by the Communications Service Tax Act 2013 (Act 864).

The platform has four components which includes fraud management, traffic monitoring, revenue assurance and Mobile money monitoring.

Fraud Management

The Minister for Communications Hon. Ursula Owusu Ekuful has disclosed that the state has managed to make tax savings of 205.6 million cedis on Fraud Management following the introduction of the Common Platform(CP).

She said the overall duration of the 5-year contract is expected to deliver tax savings of approximately GHS 795.9 million.

“This comes with a state-of-the-art Fraud Management System known as TELECOP. Through this, the CP originates over 150,000 international calls into Ghana every month to detect fraudulent SIMs automatically” she said.

The minister disclosed that the Common Platform is providing the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA) revenue assurances which includes “revenue to the government by top-ups, measurement of top-ups per operator by the CP and revenue to the operator measured by the CP (Consumption)”

“With this, the GRA is now able to verify the various revenue streams of the MNOs, plug revenue leakages and more accurately predict revenue trends from the sector for planning and policy formulation” she said.

On Mobile Money Monitoring, the Communications Minister said the Platform has reported an average monthly usage of GHS 29.1 Billion, 195.8 million transactions, with GHS 71 million generated by the Operators in transaction fees, with further breakdowns of transaction types for informed policy decision making.

According to the Minister the introduction of the Common Platform has uncovered that, prior to its introduction, GHS 300 million in taxes was lost from potential under declarations between 2015 to Q1 of 2017.

“An estimated GHS 470 million in taxes was saved between Q1 of 2017 to date as a result of the announcement of the implementation of the CP on March 8th, 2017 and its actual implementation to date. There would have been a potential loss of a total of GHS 1.5 billion through to the end of the CP contract, had the CP not been implemented” she said.

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