Minister of Information and Media Relations, Mahama Ayariga has expressed frustration at obstacles he says telcos have put in government’s way as it tries to determine whether they pay the right amount of taxes.
Charged Mahama Ayariga hits out at telcos stating, “If telecos want to help Ghanaians, allow SUBAH ” in to install electronic devices that can do real time monitoring of the payment of the Communication Service Tax.
Ayariga ‘s comments follows a committee’s report on SUBAH in which SUBAH InfoSolutions accused telcos of refusing to permit them to physically connect its equipment to their network nodes.
“No amount of verbose writing by either the telcos or the Ghana Telcoms Chamber will stop us from doing that”, he vowed
The telcos denied the request citing “the risk of SUBAH listening in to the conversation and messages of their customers”.
Government has had to pass the Act 864 to make it mandatory for telcos to give Government through its agent, physical access.
Meanwhile, TIGO, GLO, Expresso, Airtel and Vodafone have signed non-disclosure agreements with SUBAH to guarantee data confidentiality.
MTN is yet to sign. Airtel has further demanded a Non-Compete agreement with SUBAH before physical access is granted. A Non-Compete Agreement is a term used in contract law under which one party (usually an employee) agrees not to enter into or start a similar profession or trade in competition against another party (usually the employer).
This process of securing compliance from telecos have proven too frustrating for government, Mahama Ayariga suggested.
Speaking on Joy FM’s Super Morning Show, Tuesday, Mahama Ayariga noted “it has taken a long struggle [to secure cooperation]” and fumed “If they want to help Ghanaians, the first thing they should have done is to allow us to have access to their machines…ask the telcos why they insist on us signing all those agreements””.
The telcos are yet to allow the installation after all agreements have been finalised.
The Ghana Telcoms Chamber has insisted, the Telecos never knew of SUBAH Infosolutions until November 2013 after Act 864 was passed. The Chamber has said they did not receive “any punctuation of correspondence” from SUBAH although the company claimed to have done their monitoring between 2010 and 2012.
