E-Levy: Government in haste to ‘chop’ $40m on monitoring platform but we'll hook their throat — Sam George

Member of Parliament (MP) for Ningo Prampram Sam George has accused the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA) and some officials at the Ministry of Finance of conniving to spend a whopping $40million on a monitoring platform for the implementation of government’s electronic transaction levy (E-levy).

Speaking on Good Morning Ghana with Randy Abbey on Metro TV, the legislator said, the GRA and persons at the finance ministry have engaged ExpressPay to build a monitoring platform for the e-levy.

According to him, in spite of them being contracted by GRA to build the platform they lack the capacity and so have sought to engage the AWS company to use their system which is the sever-less cloud computing system.

He noted that any financial transactions outside Ghana is a breach of the law.

“Even in the law, the one they claim they have passed, the one we are challenging in court. In 6(2), it explicitly stated that they can’t deal with any private sector player.

“...Individuals who are sitting at the ministry of finance, technocrats and the people at GRA who think this is ‘chop chop’, Randy, this one will hook their here (throat). This will hook them, they can’t swallow it because we will expose every bit of it," he stated.

According to him, per the contract between Government of Ghana and Kelni GVG, government is supposed to own that platform without necessarily paying an extra $40million to ExpressPay for E-levy implementation.

The Ningo Prampram MP stressed that as it stands now, the Application Programming Interface (API) and the security architecture has not been made available to the telecommunications companies (Telcos).

The minority in parliament led by its leader and MP for Tamale South Hon. Haruna Iddrissu, MP for North Tongu Hon. Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa and MP for Bawku Central Hon. Mahama Ayariga filed an injunction application at the Supreme Court against the implementation of the controversial electronic transfer levy.