Common Platform leads to $1.1 million monthly saving - Mrs Ekuful

The Minister of Communications, Mrs Ursula Owusu Ekuful, has said the introduction of a Common Platform (CP) monitoring in the telecommunications sector has resulted in a $1.1-million monthly saving.

That, she said, would lead to the realisation of $66 million over the five-year contract period of the system.

She said unlike previous contracts, the CP offered real-time monitoring of 2.5 billion transactions per day within the telecom sector in the form of calls, SMS, mobile money transactions, as well as mobile money monitoring, as an added component.

Mrs Ekuful said this at a press briefing in Accra yesterday.

The government of Ghana commenced the monitoring of telecom activities based on the establishment of the CP, as 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 CP has four main components: Fraud Management, Traffic Monitoring, Revenue Assurance and Mobile Money Monitoring.

Since the introduction of the CP, Mrs Ekuful said, it had been less costly but more valuable.

Fraud Management

On the Fraud Management component of the platform, the minister said since its inception, it had made tax savings of over GH¢205.6 million.

"Over the life of the contract, the CP is expected to deliver tax savings of approximately GH¢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.

Revenue assurance

On Revenue Assurance, she said the platform had been providing revenue for the government through Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA) top-ups, measurement of top-ups per operator by the CP and revenue to the operator measured by the CP (consumption).

As a result, she said, the GRA was now able to verify the various revenue streams of mobile network operators (MNOs), plug revenue leakages and accurately predict revenue trends from the sector for planning and policy formulation purposes.

On mobile money monitoring, Mrs Owusu-Ekuful said “the CP has reported an average monthly usage of GH¢29.1 billion, GH¢195.8 million transactions, with GH¢71 million generated by the operators in transaction fees, with further breakdowns of transaction types for informed policy decision making”.

Significance

The minister said until the introduction of the CP, GH¢300 million in taxes was lost to potential under-declarations between 2015 and the first quarter of 2017.

She also said an estimated GH¢470 million in taxes was saved between the first quarter of 2017 and now as a result of the implementation of the CP on March 8, 2017.

She said there would have been a potential loss of GH¢1.5 billion if the CP had not been implemented.

Taxing ‘Momo’

The minister expressed the hope that MNOs would be taxed on the profit they made on mobile money transactions because they generated some GH¢71 million monthly, yet did not pay tax.

“This is of particular interest to me, but this is where the Finance Minister and I diverge because I think the GH¢71 million, which is generated by the operators in transaction fees, ought to be taxed to generate revenue for the state. We are still having conversations about that,” she added.