Communications Minister, Ursula Owusu-Ekuful, has told Parliament that the KelniGVG Common Monitoring Platform contract is yielding fruit.
The KelniGVG platform, she said, had four main components; fraud management, traffic monitoring, revenue assurance and mobile money monitoring.
The introduction of the platform under the KelniGVG contract, she reported to the House, had led to an estimated savings of GH¢300 million from under declaration between quarter 1 of 2017 to date by the previous managers of the platform.
“There would have been a potential loss of a total of GH¢1.5 billion through to the end of the Common Platform contract [in 2022] had the platform not been implemented,” she revealed.
Prior to the deal, she said the platform had uncovered that GH¢470 million in taxes was lost from potential under declarations between 2015 to quarter one of 2017 under previous managers of the platform, Subah and Afriwave.
Mrs Owusu-Ekuful, the Member of Parliament (MP) for Ablekuma West made these disclosures in an answer to a question asked of her by the MP for Ningo-Prampram, Samuel Nartey George.
Mr George wanted to know how much incremental revenue the KelniGVG deal, signed in December 2017 had made.
“The fraud management component has from inception to the end of July 2020, made tax savings of over GH¢327.3 million. Over the life of the contract, the platform 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 Telcop. Through this, the platform originates over 150,000 international calls into Ghana every month to detect fraudulent SIMs automatically,” she added.
On revenue assurance, the minister said the platforms provided revenue to government by top-ups, measurement of top-ups per operator by the platform and revenue to the operator measures by the platform.
“With this, GRA is now able to verify the various revenue streams of the mobile network operators, plug revenue leakages and more accurately predict revenue trends from the sector for planning and policy formulation.
“For mobile money monitoring, the platform has reported monthly usage for July 2020 of GH¢63.6 billion, 307.1 million transactions, with GH¢104.6 million generated by the operators in transaction fees, with further breakdowns of transaction types for informed policy decision making,” she disclosed.
The KelniGVG deal, which generated controversy was signed in December 2017 to build and operate an integrated common monitoring platform to connect nodes in the network of mobile network operators and interconnect clearinghouse where traffic and revenues could be monitored.
Implementers and beneficiary agencies of the project are the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA) and the National Communications Authority (NCA).