E-levy: There’s a bit of uncertainty as to what we’re going to implement – Ken Ashigbey
The Chief Executive Officer of the Chamber of Telecommunications, Dr. Kenneth Ashigbey says there is a bit of uncertainty concerning how the E-levy will be implemented.
According to him, this is partly because the Telecommunications Chamber is yet to secure a copy of the final bill that was passed in Parliament on Tuesday to know exactly how the law is intended to be implemented.
He further added that, the platform necessary to ensure that the E-levy process runs smoothly is yet to be set up.
Speaking on JoyNews’ PM Express, Dr. Ashigbey noted that the Telecommunications Chamber, her members, the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA) and the Ministry of Finance have been in talks trying to sort things out.
“There has been engagement between ourselves and the Ministry of Finance and the GRA, and all of that was predicated of when it is passed, so we’ve had a lot of discussions at the technical level, the GRA has some technical partners who are also working on creating a particular portal in order to aid this.
“Today, I’ve been trying to get even a copy of the final bill that was passed by parliament to understand fully what actually what has been passed so that in terms of the readiness of our teams we would be able to work on that,” he said.
“In some of the meetings we had had, there was supposed to be a phased approach starting with a very simple one because we had advised that initially wanting to do it in such a way that it was per person was going to be difficult, because the industry itself is structured, you know, charges are per wallet.
“And Evans so if 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.
“So we need to see what exactly has been passed and then be able to understand what GRA is going to implement,” he explained further.
Dr. Ashigbey noted that the Telecommunications Chamber is willing to work in their utmost capacity to ensure that the government’s implementation of the E-levy is successful, while also ensuring that mobile money networks do not lose their traffic as a result.
“We have seen the fliers that GRA has done, in government’s quest to ensure that they’re mitigating a lot of things, there are some complexities that have been introduced and we’re looking at it also as a chamber so that we can also 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, there are settings that have to be done to be able to do this,” he said.
Source: Ghana News
