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Subah contract with GRA ends today

Fri, 6 May 2016 Source: Samuel Dowuona

Today, May 6, 2016 marks the end of the one-year telecoms revenue monitoring contract between the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA) and Subah Infosolutions Limited.

This is according to a letter dated February 4, 2016, which the GRA wrote to Subah informing them of the former's intentions not to renew the contract after it finishes on Thursday, May 5, 2016.

The GRA stated categorically in that letter that “the GRA is by this letter giving you notice of its intentions not to renew the Agreement upon the attainment of the anniversary of the Agreement that is on May 5, 2016.”

It further stated that “The GRA gives notice and notice is hereby given that it intends to terminate this Agreement by exercising its rights under article 8 of the Service Agreement.”

So, unless the GRA, and for that matter government, has changed its mind, it still remains that, as per the February 4 letter, signed by the Deputy Commissioner of GRA, Subah no more has a contract with GRA to monitor telecoms revenue.

Technically, the telecoms revenue monitoring job is now available for anyone to bid for because the newly licensed interconnect clearinghouse (ICH) operator, Afriwave Telecoms has also been barred by law from doing revenue monitoring, contrary to the original intention.

But Afriwave in promising the GRA free data to aid revenue monitoring at no cost to the state.

The company has said that by default, its operations will generate data that will indicate revenue flow in the interconnect and international front, and that can be extended to the domestic front as it is at no cost to the state.

"Afriwave, as part of ICH infrastructure has implemented the full platform to generate the data needed to accurately compute the volume of traffic exchanged within the operators networks and across their networks to other carriers. Afriwave is therefore in a position to accurately determine the revenue due to the Government from the operators. The infrastructure deployed by Afriwave for this purpose is part of the larger ICH infrastructure hence it is offering to the GRA at no additional cost," the company said.

The company said; "With this offer from Afriwave, there would not be any need for the GRA to issue another contract with any company that would ask for payment for rendering the service to the GRA."

Payments

It would be recalled that Subah was entitled to some 13.5 per cent of every incremental revenue they discover in their monitoring work. They were therefore paid almost GHC75million at a time when there was no evidence of any real time monitoring they did, and incremental revenue they discovered.

Every month, GRA and the National Communications Authority (NCA) paid Subah millions of Ghana cedis for monitoring telecom revenue on both the local and international fronts, even though the NCA has said Subah does not do real time monitoring as mandated to.

But Afriwave is promising to do the monitoring work by default and for free, so that the state can save the 13.5 per cent of revenue for national development projects.

Again, Subah kept publicizing their role in SIMBOX fraud busts and the millions of dollars they saved the country doing so, but the NCA had earlier expressed general dissatisfaction with the work of Subah.

Meanwhile, doing just test runs of its equipment on telcos' networks, Afriwave recently reported detecting and deactivating over 300,000 SIM cards being used in SIMBOX fraud over a five month period.

This was arguably because Afriwave applied a more aggressive method in combating the SIMBOX fraud menace.

Now that the Subah contract is over, as per GRA's February 4, 2016 letter, all is set for Afriwave to start full commercial service, and the company has said its full operations promises to nib SIMBOX fraud in the bud even more aggressively and yield much bigger dividends for telcos and for the state.

Source: Samuel Dowuona