Costly Duplication: Who is Imposing Truedare on Customs?
The Truedare deal is being sold as innovation, but to many within Ghana’s policy, technology and enforcement ecosystem, it increasingly looks like an expensive duplication forced onto the Ghana Revenue Authority under the guise of reform.
What Parliament approved as an “AI-driven digital customs tracking system” risks becoming not a leap forward for Customs, but a backward step into fragmentation, blurred accountability and avoidable costs — all while sidelining a system the state has already paid for.
When lawmakers endorsed the agreement between the GRA and Cyprus-registered Truedare Investments Limited, the official justification appeared simple and persuasive.
Ghana, the public was told, needs a new technology partner because the existing Integrated Customs Management System supposedly lacks the sophistication required for advanced audit, intelligence and investigations. In that telling, Truedare was not a luxury but a necessity.
Yet beneath that neat explanation lies a far more troubling question now gaining traction in serious policy conversations: what if ICUMS already has the intelligence capacity being promised by Truedare, and the real problem is not technological absence, but an institutional refusal to properly use what already exists?
An AI solution in search of a problem
Emerging technical testimony and internal documentation reviewed by NewsCenta strongly suggest that the Truedare platform risks duplicating capabilities that already sit within ICUMS.
Far from filling a genuine gap, Truedare appears positioned to replicate functions that ICUMS was explicitly procured to perform, raising uncomfortable questions about motive, value for money and governance.
More controversially, the evidence points to growing pressure from powerful interests linked to the political and policy establishment, nudging Customs and the GRA to embrace a new vendor to do what ICUMS was designed to do.
This is not a story of organic reform driven by operational necessity, but one of imposition — subtle, persistent and wrapped in the language of innovation.
A system built for intelligence, not just transactions
When ICUMS replaced the GCNet and WestBlue regime in 2020, it was not introduced as a basic billing or declaration engine.
It was sold as a comprehensive single-window customs management platform, capable of unifying the entire customs lifecycle.
From manifest processing and declarations to classification, valuation, risk management, inspection outcomes, release procedures and post-clearance audit, ICUMS was meant to be the digital backbone of Ghana’s customs administration.
Crucially, it was designed to integrate with other border agencies, ensuring that intelligence is shared rather than siloed.
At its core, ICUMS is a deeply data-rich transactional system.
It holds complete historical records of shipments, traders and clearing agents. It logs audit trails of overrides and approvals.
It contains configurable rules engines, risk parameters and reporting modules that can be extended through application programming interfaces.
From a technical standpoint, this architecture is precisely what modern artificial intelligence systems require.
Experts familiar with large-scale customs platforms describe ICUMS in simple but revealing terms: it is the nervous system. The intelligence — whether rules-based analytics or machine-learning models — is the brain layered on top.
If the data flows and workflows already exist, adding intelligence is an evolutionary step, not a revolution requiring a brand-new offshore platform.
AI in Customs is about discipline, not drama
Globally, artificial intelligence in customs administration is far less glamorous than political speeches suggest.
It is not about mysterious black boxes replacing human judgment.
Instead, it is about disciplined processes: anomaly detection to flag unusual values or routes, pattern recognition to identify repeat behaviour among traders, predictive risk scoring based on historical cases, and feedback loops that learn from which alerts actually resulted in seizures or revenue recovery.
Every one of these techniques depends on the very data ICUMS already captures in the normal course of operations.
Transaction histories, valuation and classification records, inspection results, post-clearance audit outcomes and investigation trails are all stored within the system.
Technically, “adding AI” means configuring appropriate models, feeding them this data and embedding their outputs back into ICUMS so that officers see alerts in real time, act on them and record outcomes.
What it does not require is a parallel system sitting outside the core customs workflow, owned and controlled by a separate vendor, accessing the same data but operating under a different accountability regime.
That is precisely the danger inherent in the Truedare arrangement.
Dormant modules and the silence that follows
People familiar with ICUMS’ internal configuration say that many of the capabilities now being advertised under the Truedare deal already exist within the system.
There is a risk management module capable of combining rules-based logic with statistical scoring to channel consignments intelligently.
There are post-clearance audit tools that can select cases based on trader behaviour, sectoral risks and historical patterns.
There are investigation and intelligence features that allow flagged traders or consignments to be tracked across multiple shipments over time.
Yet within Customs, there is a quiet admission that these tools are not being fully exploited.
Risk rules are not refreshed frequently enough to reflect evolving smuggling techniques.
Post-clearance audit units are under-resourced and often overwhelmed by routine work rather than data-driven targeting.
Feedback from investigations and seizures is not systematically fed back into the system to refine future alerts.
The conclusion is unavoidable. The bottleneck is not software capability, but institutional discipline and management.
Instead of addressing these weaknesses head-on, the narrative shifts conveniently to the supposed inadequacy of ICUMS and the urgent need for a new “AI system”.
Truedare becomes the solution to a problem that has been misdiagnosed.
Why a new vendor is politically convenient
From a governance perspective, the claim that ICUMS “does not have AI” is extraordinarily useful.
It allows policymakers to justify a fresh contract with a new vendor without confronting uncomfortable questions about capacity gaps, enforcement culture or accountability failures within Customs.
Responsibility is shifted from people to platforms. Technology becomes the scapegoat.
It also creates the illusion of decisive action. A new offshore partner is unveiled. A new dashboard is promised.
A new acronym enters the reform vocabulary. The optics are powerful, even if the substance is thin.
More troubling still, this framing opens the door for powerful actors connected to government to exert influence over procurement decisions.
Customs and the GRA are quietly but firmly pushed toward Truedare for functions ICUMS was explicitly procured to perform. ICUMS is portrayed as limited and outdated, Truedare as modern and intelligent.
Any resistance from within Customs is dismissed as technophobia rather than prudence.
What is carefully avoided are the harder questions. Why have existing risk and audit modules not been fully configured and institutionalised?
Why is there no visible data science function within Customs driving intelligence-led enforcement?
Why are changes in smuggling routes and valuation fraud not systematically translated into updated ICUMS rules?
Why are recommendations from the Auditor-General, the Office of the Special Prosecutor and internal reviews not encoded into the system as enforceable logic?
Without honest answers, Truedare risks becoming, as one expert bluntly put it, “a second steering wheel in the same car”.
The hidden and inevitable cost of duplication
There is also a very real fiscal and operational cost to sidelining ICUMS while bolting on new systems.
Even if the Truedare deal is marketed as “no cost to the state”, any per-container charge, transaction levy or revenue-sharing mechanism will ultimately be passed on to traders through higher costs.
That is a direct financial consequence of failing to extract full value from a platform the state has already paid for.
Operational complexity multiplies as well. Each additional system requires training, integration and maintenance.
Conflicts inevitably arise over which system’s data is authoritative when discrepancies occur.
The original promise of a single window is gradually eroded, replaced by fragmented oversight and blurred responsibility.
Perhaps most damaging is the accountability cost. When responsibilities are split across multiple vendors and platforms, it becomes easier for everyone to blame “the other system” when leakages occur.
Clear questions — why a risk rule was not updated, why an alert was ignored — dissolve into technical excuses and contractual finger-pointing.
The question customs can no longer avoid
At the heart of the GRA–Truedare controversy lies a simple but unsettling question.
If ICUMS already has the data, the risk engines and the architectural foundation for advanced analytics, why are those capabilities not visible in daily enforcement at Ghana’s ports?
It is a question that only Customs can fully answer, but it is one Parliament and the Ministry of Finance must insist on confronting. If Ghana were to adopt an ICUMS-first approach seriously, the narrative would change fundamentally.
The headline would no longer be about importing a new artificial intelligence system, but about Customs finally switching on the intelligence it already owns.
So far, the debate has been framed as a false choice between old technology and new technology, between analogue processes and artificial intelligence.
The deeper issue is institutional will. Will Customs fully use the tools the country has already invested in?
Will Parliament demand proof that existing systems have been pushed to their limits before endorsing new contracts?
Will policymakers prioritise discipline and transparency over the allure of shiny platforms promoted by powerful interests?
In customs administration, as in much of public governance, the most transformative upgrade is not always a new system.
Sometimes, it is the courage to use the system you already have — and to accept the accountability that comes with it.
