The Chief Executive Officer of the Electronic Money Issuers Chamber of Ghana, Dr. Ken Ashigbey, has welcomed the scrapping of the 1.0% Electronic Transaction Levy (E-levy), saying, the introduction of the levy was a massive error committed by the former finance minister, Ken Ofori-Atta.
According to him, the industry players has been anticipating this news due to the commitment shown by President John Mahama, captured in the ruling National Democratic Congress manifesto.
Parliament has unanimously approved the abolishment of the E-levy, bringing immense relief to about 23 million subscribers of mobile money.
Speaking on NewsNight on Joy FM, Dr. Ashigbey said the E-levy did not generate the intended revenue, hence its description as a regressive tax.
“This is good news, e-levy was a bad policy, the government did not engage stakeholders before implementing it. We knew that the numbers were not going to come because if you look at the way the industry is structured, we had told the government that they were not going to realised [get the required money from the e-levy].”
“If you look at the rate of growth of the transactions before the e-levy was imposed, it declined. The Minister of Finance [Ken Ofori-Atta] made a massive error in introducing it. It did not generate the revenue that was expected”, he added.
Dr. Ashigbey continued that some financial technology firms left the shores of Ghana because of the e-levy.
According to him, they were running losses because transactions had declined.
Dr. Ashigbey is confident the scrapping of the e-levy will give customers more money to spend, whilst transactions will go up.
Meanwhile, in the next couple of days the telecommunication firms and the EMIs will recalibrate their systems to ensure that there is no charge of e-levy for every mobile money transaction.
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