Former Finance Minister, Dr Kwabena Duffuor, has suggested that the Akufo-Addo government should scrap the Electronic Transfer Levy (E-Levy) if it is not generating enough revenue as expected.
Describing the E-Levy as a “nuisance tax” in an interview on Citi TV he said “We need to ask ourselves, are we getting enough from it? If we are not getting enough from it, then it is a nuisance tax, and we should scrap it.”
The Ghana Chamber of Telecommunications implemented the revised E-Levy rate of 1% on January 11, 2023.
This was after the government, during the 2023 Budget and Economic Policy Statement, reviewed the 1.5% E-Levy downwards to 1% effective January 2023.
The electronic transfer levy (E-Levy) accrued GH¢455.58 million for the first half of this year, missing its target by 53.64 per cent.
This is against a target of GH¢982.85 million, representing a shortfall of GH¢527.27 million of the half-year target of expected collection.
According to the Summary of Economic and Financial Data (May 2022), active mobile money subscribers saw a decline in April to 18.6 million from the 18.9 million recorded the previous month.
The mobile money industry also lost 4,000 active agents, as their number declined to 454,000 in April from the previous month’s 458,000. The value of transactions also dropped by GH¢2.8 billion within the period under discussion.
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