…they will be able to track the interactions of the taxpayers in the digital economy. They should be able to classify them properly, and improve the tax-to-GDP ratio…
You have to give credit to Global Voice Group (GVG) for the shameless way they are evolving from a business that adds no value whilst collecting taxes from African telcos to a business that adds no value whilst collecting taxes from Africans in general. Their strategic plan was always obvious, despite their increasingly anachronistic name. The initial ruse was to pretend some digital magic would allow governments to magically squeeze billions of dollars of previously unnoticed value from telecoms voice traffic. The reality was that GVG was simply taking a cut of telco taxes that would have been collected anyway. This is why none of the governments that signed a contract with GVG has ever presented exact figures for the return on investment, despite GVG’s systems supposedly being used to examine data in order to pinpoint where additional tax will be collected. However, voice revenues are in permanent decline, not least because of the greed of governments that follow GVG’s advice by hiking up stealth taxes on voice traffic, which then encourages Africans to switch to OTT comms services. Like any parasite, GVG’s response is to simply find new victims to leech from.
GVG are not even trying to hide their business plan. This extraordinary but little-seen video shows James Claude, CEO of Global Voice Group, explaining how GVG wants every African to have a digital identity so GVG can use electronic surveillance to monitor how much tax they have paid.
