We must tax telcos’ GHS71m a month for MoMo profit – Ursula

The Minister of Communication, Mrs Ursula Owusu-Ekuful, is pushing for the taxing of profits made from mobile money (MoMo) transactions by the telecommunication companies in Ghana.

According to the Member of Parliament (MP) for the Ablekuma West constituency, the telcos are able to generate GHS71 million in profits per month and that must be taxed.

“This is of particular interest to me but this is where the Finance Minister and I diverge because I think that GHS71 million which is generated by the operators in transaction fees, they ought to pay taxes on that revenue to the State,” she said at a press conference in Accra on Thursday, 14 November 2019, as she revealed: “We are still having conversations about that”.

Meanwhile, the minister has disclosed that the state has managed to make tax savings of GHS205.6 million in fraud management following the introduction of the Common Platform.

On mobile money monitoring, the minister said the platform has reported an average monthly usage of GHS 29.1 billion, 195.8 million transactions, with GHS71 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, GHS300 million in taxes was lost from potential under-declarations between 2015 to Q1 of 2017.

“An estimated GHS470 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 GHS1.5 billion through to the end of the CP contract, had the CP not been implemented”, she said.