Rising from strategic need to monitor, verify revenues and capital importation by telecom giants, Ghanaian government has implemented the Common Monitoring Platform (CMP) tame the tide of confusion that recently trialed a telecom group in Nigeria.
Recall that MTN Nigeria last year had issues on breaches in Certificate of Capital Importation (CCI) which forced the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) to come down hard on it with over billions of dollars in fine which was later brushed down to some millions of dollars already paid to the government.
To activate the move, government stepped up the provision in the Communications Service Tax Act, 2013 (Act 864).
This was revealed Wednesday in Ghana by the Minister of Communications, Mrs. Owusu-Ekuful, who addressed the media on the development.
She said the CMP provides services such as traffic monitoring, revenue assurance, fraud management and mobile money monitoring.
According to her, the CMP platform provided real-time accurate and independent monitoring of all voice traffic volumes and ensured the comprehensive billing verification and collection of all telecom-related taxes, levies and regulatory fees due government, while promoting tax compliance.
The minister said “CMP monitors the amount of revenue generated by Service Providers across various revenue streams (Data, Voice, Value Added Services, mobile money, and wholesale services among others for the purpose of computing the CST, VAT, NHIL and the 1 per cent universal access contributions.”
“The system offered the technological means to detect and eliminate fraudulent and unlicensed operators through the appropriate tracking of international inbound traffic.
“This would help reduce operations of SIM box operators as MNOs block SIM cards used for such fraudulent operations.
She revealed further that “Five thousand daily calls are generated from about 57 countries to monitor how they are terminated in Ghana.
“When these international calls are terminated as local calls, it confirms the fraudulent use of SIM boxes to bypass the authorised international gateways.
“The numbers used to perpetrate SIM box fraud are sent to operators to block and to provide data to facilitate the geographical location (geolocation) and elimination of these SIM boxes.
“We must emphasise that only the signalling information and data required by the NCA and GRA for their regulatory and compliance functions are received by the CMP. No customer voice or data communication is received by it,” Mrs. Owusu-Ekuful assured.
Business Hilights Ghana Bureau chief reports that the law enjoined the Minister of Finance to collaborate with the Communication Minister to establish a monitoring mechanism to verify the actual revenue that accrued to network vendors for the purpose of computing taxes due the Government.
Additional details showed that the activated legislation allowed physical access to the nodes of the vendors’ network at an equivalent point in the network where the providers’ billing systems are connected and further ensures that a common platform is used for the purpose of monitoring revenues under the Act as well as revenues accruing from levies under the Electronic Communications Act 2009, (Act 775).
