The 1% Electronic Transaction Levy (E-levy) that the government declared in the 2023 Budget has yet not been implemented by the nation's telecommunications firms.
The government revised the 1.5 percent electronic transaction charge downward to 1 percent effective January 2023 when it released the 2023 Budget and Economic Policy Statement.
Parliament has also supported the cut.
Four days into the new year, Philip Nii Lartey reported that the telecoms had yet to implement the revised tariff.
According to Joshua Edmonson, the Deputy National Public Relations Officer of the Ghanaian Mobile Money Association, the revised rate would most likely go into effect soon.
Despite having been declared, it has not yet been put into practice, but we are optimistic that it will soon. The telecoms will undoubtedly need to make some changes to their database before implementation, but the good news is that it has been announced and will go into effect soon.
Since its inception, the tax has fallen short of all of its income goals, and participants in the telco industry have expressed worries about how feasible it would be to operate a successful mobile money service while it was still in existence.
In April 2022, telecoms reported a loss of nearly 300,000 mobile money subscribers following the levy's adoption.
Just before the E-levy went into effect in May 2022, according to the Summary of Economic and Financial data (May 2022), the number of active mobile money customers fell from 18.9 million the previous month to 18.6 million in April.
Additionally, the mobile money sector lost 4,000 active agents as their number fell from 458,000 in March to 454,000 in April. This fall in active agents was reflected in the value of transactions, which fell by GH2.8 billion during the time period under consideration.