Common Platform Saved Ghana GH¢300m – Ursula

Minister of Communications, Ursula Owusu-Ekuful, says the introduction of a common monitoring platform (CMP) under the KelniGVG contract has saved the country an estimated GH¢300 million in taxes between the first quarter of 2017 to date.

According to her, the CMP has uncovered that prior to the introduction of the common platform, GH¢470 million in taxes was lost from potential under declarations between 2015 to first quarter of 2017.

“There would have been a potential loss of a total of GH¢1.5 billion had the CMP not been implemented,” the Communications Minister stated in Parliament yesterday.

She was responding to questions on the Floor of Parliament and indicated further that the introduction of the CMP had resulted in savings of $1.1 million monthly over the previous contracts, resulting in a total of $66 million over the five-year contract period.

“The National Communication Authority (NCA) was paying $915,969 to Afriwave, while the GRA was paying $1,675,492 to Subah, totaling $2,591.462,” Ursula, who is also the Member of Parliament for Ablekuma West, revealed.

She disclosed, “The NCA now pays $596,490 and the GRA $894,735, a total of $1,491,225. Additionally, unlike the previous contracts, the CMP offers real time monitoring of 2.5 billion transactions per day within the telecom sector (e.g. Calls, SMS, Mobile money transactions, etc.).”

According to her, although there was some level of monitoring by Subah and Afriwave at the time, both companies primarily depended on after-the-fact CDRs from the Telco’s and could not independently verify these numbers.

“Today, we have an online and real time monitoring platform direct from the same information sources as the Telecoms companies into the CMP, as this system independently monitors and verifies declarations from the MNOs and gives NCA and GRA 24/7 full visibility on all transactions within the sector.”

She said in pursuant to this, KelniGVG was contracted on December 27, 2017 to build and operate the CMP which is an integrated single platform connecting to nodes in the networks of all Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) and the Interconnect Clearinghouse (ICH) where traffic and revenues can be monitored.

She mentioned them as Fraud Management, Traffic Monitoring, Revenue Assurance and Mobile Money Monitoring, pointing out that the Fraud Management component has, since inception to end of July 2020, made tax savings of over GH¢327.3 million.

“Over the life of the contract, the CMP is expected to deliver tax savings of approximately GH¢799.6 million. This comes with a state-of-the-art Fraud Management System known as TELECOP. Through this, the CMP originates over 150,000 international calls into Ghana every month to detect fraudulent SIMS which are automatically blocked.”