Ghana to Audit International Revenues

The National Communication Authority (NCA) of Ghana has announced it will conduct revenue assurance audits based on CDRs provided by the country’s six telecoms operators; you can read more from ITWeb Africa. NCA’s motive is straightforward: they want to check the government is receiving all the tax that should be levied on international calls. Joshua Peprah, Director of Regulatory of Administration, showed the diplomatic skills we have all come to expect from a public servant:

“We are working with a consultant over a three-year period and the analysis we have done so far indicates that over the three years the state can make $200 million in taxes from inbound international calls…”

“…if the records a telco presents does not tally with our audit records the respective telco is in trouble.”

In other words, the regulator thinks the telcos are run by liars. It seems that nobody has told Mr. Peprah that some consultants are liars too.

This move by Ghana’s NCA links to their attempts to force the installation of real-time monitoring of international gateway switches, though this is being fought by operators. Similar arguments are taking place in Malawi, where customers are concerned about the dangers of Malawi’s regulator infringing their privacy. At least the Ghanaian regulator deserves some credit for realizing that you can do an audit before implementing real-time monitoring, though it remains to be seen if they will drop the real-time monitoring plans if the audit gives a clean bill of health to Ghana’s operators. However, Ghana’s operators are not just giving in. Vodafone Ghana’s Revenue Assurance and Risk Manager, Ashley Radcliffe, denied there was a need to install equipment that he said could interfere with quality of service and customer privacy. Radcliffe also said:

“As far as we are concerned, we check the number of minutes of international calls at several and various levels to ensure they are absolutely accurate before we present them to the NCA so we are not perturbed by any audit to be carried out by the regulator.”

Eric Priezkalns
Eric Priezkalnshttp://revenueprotect.com

Eric is the Editor of Commsrisk. Look here for more about the history of Commsrisk and the role played by Eric.

Eric is also the Chief Executive of the Risk & Assurance Group (RAG), an association of professionals working in risk management and business assurance for communications providers. RAG was founded in 2003 and Eric was appointed CEO in 2016.

Previously Eric was Director of Risk Management for Qatar Telecom and he has worked with Cable & Wireless, T‑Mobile, Sky, Worldcom and other telcos. He was lead author of Revenue Assurance: Expert Opinions for Communications Providers, published by CRC Press.

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1 COMMENT

  1. This is the kind of news that RA software vendors (and RA contractors) must be applauding! Here’s a brand new potential market opening-up.
    With European countries also chasing tax-Euros to pay their debts, we can imagine that they might want to follow this example and why not get tools to monitor the completeness and accuracy of the tax reports provided by Telco companies, with a CDR processing tool. This would surely give the RA market a big boost.

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