The national revenue assurance audit of Ghanaian telcos has become a long-running embarrassment to the country, fueled by repeated claims and counter-claims of corruption and waste. However, the change of Ghana’s government may see this fiasco come to an end, as the country’s new Communications and Finance Ministers have agreed to meet and resolve the “confusion” over which of the outsourced suppliers has the responsibility to conduct the government audit of telco revenues. Two separate firms, Afriwave and Subah, claim to have authority to perform seemingly identical audits after they received contracts from the comms regulator and tax agency respectively. Now B&FT reports that Ghana’s Minister of Communications, Ursula Owusu Ekuful (seen pictured above, at her acceptance hearing) told them…
…I will be meeting with the Minister for Finance, particularly when it comes to revenue assurance, to sort out the confusion between Afriwave and Subah in that space.
The comms and tax authorities have openly argued about who should audit telco revenues since 2015. It seemed that the row would eventually end with the completion of Subah’s contract for the Ghanaian tax agency. However, the dispute ignited again in public after it was discovered Subah’s contract was renewed in December 2016, just before the departure of the outgoing government.
The full B&FT story can be found here.
