The Chairman of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Communications, Mr Albert Abongo, said the committee was satisfied that Subah had put in place equipment to monitor tax revenue that should come to the government from the various telecom companies.
He said the committee would rely on the National Communications Authority (NCA) to ascertain whether the equipment of Subah was indeed monitoring revenue flow of the telecom companies.
“At the moment, we are satisfied that we have seen something on the ground; we can do further verifications with the NCA to be sure that this is actually happening on the ground,” he stated. Mr Abongo urged telcos to work with companies that the government had assigned to realise revenue due the state.
Members of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Communications last Friday inspected the data centres of six telecommunications companies to verify if connections and nodes of Subah Infosolutions have been connected to their systems.
The visit to the six telecom operators was also to provide members of the select committee with the opportunity to ascertain for themselves if indeed the operators have complied with the requirement by law to have the nodes connected to monitor their revenue flow.
The telecos visited were Mobile Telecommunication Network (MTN), Glo, Vodafone, tiGO, Airtel and Expresso.
Significance of connection
Under the amended Communication Service Tax (CST) law, Act 754, Subah Infosolutions is mandated to monitor the telecos with the connection of billing nodes to their data centres so that the taxes that the telecom companies are expected to pay to the state can be determined.
Currently, Subah Infosolutions Ghana Ltd, which has a contract with the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA) to monitor revenue flow from telecom operators, has installed equipment in every operator’s location to be able to collect the relevant information for the calculation of the operator’s tax responsibility.
Briefing journalists on the importance of the visit by Parliament, Subah Info’s General Manager, Business Development, Mr Redeemer Kwame, said: “This trip is just to verify whether indeed we have equipment at those locations that we say we do and also whether they are connected as we say we have.”
Mr Kwame said Subah had also installed equipment in redundant mode, which meant that every installed equipment had a duplicate, so that when the ones running stopped functioning, the standby would take over and an information relayed to their data centre on the fault.
“Because we have to report independently, we also have to make sure that the information provided is credible,” he added.
He said before the trip, the Select Committee on Communications had been shown some of the reports and a graph representation of how the data flowed onto the Subah platform for local and international call monitoring to aid the committee to verify things for themselves.
Secrecy and tight security
The trip to the various operator sites in Accra was conducted in an atmosphere of secrecy, fear of exposure and tight security, with journalists barred at every location from using cameras to capture the installations at the heart of operations of the telecom companies.
Mr Kwame explained to the journalists that “everywhere that data is used to realise revenue, there is some sensitivity to it and it is not everybody that has access to such places.”
Indeed, the restriction to the data centres of the operators played out everywhere the committee went, with some delays experienced before an official accompanied the visitors to the sites.
However, the unbearable delay at the tiGO data centre made the committee boycott inspection of their connection, although officials of Millicom Ghana Ltd, owners of the network, later apologised to the committee, saying the prolonged delay was due to a miscommunication on their part. They gave an assurance that they had the Subah system in place and were willing to conduct the team around the facility.
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