GHANA TO START MONITORING TELECOMS REVENUE
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The Minister of Communications, Mrs. Owusu-Ekuful, on Thursday in Accra said the Government of Ghana has successfully executed the Common Monitoring Platform (CMP) to observe and confirm revenues gathered from telecommunication.
She made the statement while speaking to journalists at the Meet-the Press series in Accra, and explains that all the issues outlined by stakeholders and all mobile network operators (MNOs) associated with the platform have been attended to.
Owusu-Ekuful added that the CMP is the implementation of the provisions in the Communications Service Tax Act, 2013 (Act 864) which provides services such as traffic monitoring, revenue assurance, fraud management and mobile money monitoring.
“It monitors the amount of revenue generated by Service Providers across various revenue streams (Data, Voice, Value Added Services, mobile money, and wholesale services among others for the purpose of computing the CST, VAT, NHIL and the 1 percent universal access contributions,” she said.
She said the system proffer the technological means to identify and eradicate deceitful and unlicensed operators through the appropriate tracking of international inbound traffic.
“Five thousand daily calls are generated from about 57 countries to monitor how they are terminated in Ghana.
“When these international calls are terminated as local calls, it confirms the fraudulent use of SIM boxes to bypass the authorised international gateways.
“The numbers used to perpetrate SIM box fraud are sent to operators to block and provide data that facilitates the geographical location (geolocation) and elimination of these SIM boxes.
“We must emphasise that only the signalling information and data required by the NCA and GRA for their regulatory and compliance functions are received by the CMP. No customer voice or data communication is received by it,” Owusu-Ekuful clarified.
With the support of the law which instructs the Minister of Finance to work together with the Minister of Communication to establish a monitoring techniques to authenticate the authentic revenue that accrues to network operators for the purpose of computing taxes payable to the government.
The legislation permits physical access to nodes of the vendors’ network at an equivalent point in the network where the providers’ billing systems are connected.
This guarantees that a general platform is used to monitor revenues under the Act, in the same vain with revenues accruing from levies under the Electronic Communications Act 2009, (Act 775).
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