Ursula Owusu-Ekuful, the Minister of Communications and Digitalisation, says the success of the Communication Service Tax (CST) makes her optimistic that the country will also benefit from the E-Levy.
Speaking at the government town hall meeting in Koforidua on Thursday (27 January 2022), Owusu-Ekuful said the E-Levy will help the government improve on revenue generation to develop the country.
“We need to finance our development agenda and stop depending on loans and borrowing from other countries if we are to be truly independent,” Owusu-Ekuful said.
“Unfounded fears”
The Communications Minister said Ghanaians have no cause for alarm about the E-Levy, because it will help raise the revenue Ghana needs to support its development. She also noted: “The E-Levy is being introduced at a lower rate of 1.75%. In other countries, digital taxes are being introduced to the tune of 10% and we travel there to seek loans for our development and to borrow.
“In 2020, the Communication Service Tax (CST) Amendment Act was passed to reduce the rate from 9% to 5%. When the CST was introduced, it faced similar opposition [to what] we are seeing currently and the current Speaker dubbed it a ‘talk tax’ … the NDC and the [telecommunications] industry, led by the GSMA [Global System for Mobile Communications] data, claimed it would damage the growth of the telecommunications industry, as consumers would change their mobile communication habits. This did not happen; they were unfounded fears,” Owusu-Ekuful said.
Speaking on the same platform, Ken Ofori-Atta, the Minister for Finance, said the E-Levy, introduced by the NPP government in the Budget first read in November 2021, is not the most egregious tax ever passed in this country.
He said it has become necessary to introduce the E-Levy because Ghana needs to develop using its own resources, and not by borrowing constantly from external sources.
Ofori-Atta further argued that the country cannot afford to enter into another managed programme with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), because the restrictions that come with such a programme cannot help the country in its quest to develop at this point in time.
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