Birim South Assembly to go IT

Akim Oda, Sept 29, GNA - The Birim South District in the Eastern Region is to adopt Information Technology and Communication (ITC) in its administration through the establishment of a website for data storage and retrieval and summoning of assembly members through their E-mails address.

To this end, discussions are going on between the assembly and an IT company to offer computer literacy to all assembly members and opening of E-mails for them.

Mr Frank Kwame Busumtwi, the District Chief Executive said this at the assembly's Ordinary Meeting at Akim Oda on Wednesday. He said a task force would be put in place soon to compile accurate data on all revenue sources to aid the assembly in its development planning based on more reliable future budgets. Mr Busumtwi said a recent special revenue task force set up to collect lorry park tolls at Oda was able to collect three million cedis per week as against an average of 850,000 cedis collected by the assembly's revenue collectors.

He said as a first step to redeem the negative situation, he had called for a special audit task force to audit all books of revenue collectors as well as the undertaking of spot checks of revenue collectors while on duty.

Mr Busumtwi said where it became necessary, all the revenue collectors would be asked to proceed on leave for national service personnel to collect revenue to ascertain the level of compromise that the assembly's collectors had engaged in with taxpayers. On internally generated revenue collected so far, he said as at June, the assembly had collected only 536 million cedis as against the 1.6 billion cedis projected.

On the Poverty Alleviation Fund (PAF), Mr Busumtwi said 1.2 billion cedis was disbursed to about 1,200 beneficiaries over the past three years but expressed regret that less than 100 million cedis had been repaid so far.

He said in future, disbursement would be made to only groups and urged the assembly members to inform their electorate to ensure compliance.