Finance Minister, Ken Ofori-Atta has today, Thursday, November 24, presented the 2023 “Nkabom” budget in Parliament, asserting the government is taking measures to reduce the Electronic Transaction Levy (E-LEVY) from 1.5% to 1% next year.
According to the Finance Minister, “Government will review the E-Levy Act and more specifically, reduce the headline rate from 1.5% to one percent (1%) of the transaction value as well as the removal of the daily threshold.
“This is a way of reducing the hectic stress on the average Ghanaian’s shoulder hence making life bearable as everyone complains of hardships.”
Moving forward with his presentation, Mr. Ken Ofori-Atta noted that to restore the country’s macroeconomic stability and accelerate economic transformation as articulated in the Post COVID-19 Programme for Economic Growth (PC-PEG), government has an agenda that will aggressively mobilize revenue, streamline and rationalize expenditure among others.
In an earlier interview, CEO of Ghana Chamber of Telecommunications, Dr. Kenneth Ashigbey, called for the reduction in the E-levy from 1.5% to 0.1%.
According to him, the government erred when it decided to tax the digital platforms rather than taxing the digital economy.
He explained that the taxing of mobile money platforms such as mobile money wallets as well as fintech platforms has significantly contributed to the stunting growth of Ghana’s digital economy.
He said more and more Ghanaians are now refusing to transact business digitally as against the years prior to the introduction of the e-levy when the digital economy was experiencing a boom.
This he says has driven away investments from Ghana’s fintech space and could possibly lead to a collapse of the industry should revenue continue to drop as fast as they are now especially taking into consideration the current economic woes.
“The error we made with e-levy was that instead of taxing the digital economy, we taxed the digital platforms. Ideally what we should have been doing is helping the digital economy to grow, so now we have the situation where a lot of people like me, I have a farm…and I have a merchant wallet so when people buy they put the money on the wallet, when I have to pay my people, I pay my people with that,” he stated.
