Minister-designate for Trade and Industry, Alan Kyeremanteng, has stated that the deployment of trade facilitation system – the Integrated Customs Management System (ICUMS) – at Ghana’s land and sea borders earned the country an extra Ghs 1.6 billion in revenue mobilization.
The extra revenue earned by government through the ICUMS from June 2020 to December 2020, is well above the total revenue mobilized by GCNet and West Blue for the same period in 2019.
Taking his turn at the Appointments Committee of Parliament, Mr Kyeremanteng noted a 23 percentage points increase in revenue mobilization at Ghana’s borders particularly the sea borders was recorded in the first month of the deployment of the ICUMS system which is the Ghanaian rendition of Korea’s UNIPASS.
Noting that, this was during the time of heightened trade disruptions across the globe on the back of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“ICUMS was fully deployed in June 2020 and just after the first month of deployment, there was an increase of 23% in revenue in July over the previous 2019 year and this was against the background of the Covid experience which meant that there were trade disruptions. In the second month which was August, a 31% increase was recorded, then in September 34%, in October also 34%, November 25% and in December 19%,” he stated.
According to the Minister-designate, the combined revenue increases amounts to a total of Ghs 1.6 billion additional revenue raked in for government through the ICUMS.
“So how is that a system that was described in very negative terms upon deployment could immediately increase our revenue mobilization,” he quizzed, “because in the first 6 months of deployment we earned Ghs 1.6 billion over the 2019 revenue figures and if not for Covid it would have been more,” he added.
Justifying government’s termination of its contract with previous service providers – GCNet, West Blue and some other four companies – the Minister-designate posited that government wanted to do away with the multiplicity of service providers in Ghana’s trade facilitation setup and processes as well as blocking revenue leakages.
Another reason was to provide a fully integrated, coordinated, end-to-end single window trade facilitation system which have all been made possible by the ICUMS system.
