E-levy: One month duration for charging entities to prepare wasn’t enough – Ken Ashigbey

The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Ghana Chamber of Telecommunications, Mr Ken Ashigbey has said the one month duration given to charging entities to prepare for the e-levy takeoff was not enough.

In his view, such a major project required more time for the charging entities to get their systems in place in order to minimise the possible challenges that come along with the implementation.

Speaking in interview with TV3 news, he said “For a project that would include over 300 charging entities, if you take Mobile Money alone, there are tens of millions of customers, that is such a major project and the one month time was not good enough for us to complete the processes, test them and be able to assure customers that when you went live with it the user experience will be good and there will be no mayor hitches.”

Some customers have already reported cases of wrong deductions since the policy started on Sunday May 1.

The Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA) accordingly issued guidelines for reversal of wrong deductions with respect to the implementation of the e-levy policy which started on Sunday May 1.

The authority in statement said “Under this phased approach it has been decided that all ‘on-net’ and ‘off-net’ transfers including transfer to own account shall be subject to the e-levy.

“This is because of the lack of visibility across all networks due to the phased approach. However, charging entities are to exempt ‘on-net’ transfers between accounts owned by the same person where the identity of the person can be determined”.

The GRA said it is collating all the feed backs to work on them.

Some customers have already reported cases of wrong deductions since the policy started on Sunday.

But Isaac Kwabena Amoako, a member of the e-levy Technical Committee of the GRA said on the News 360 on TV3 Sunday May 1,that “On day one of implementation we have been taking feedbacks.

Source: 3news.com|Ghana