He made these remarks at a two-day workshop organised by the International Centre for Tax and Development (ICTD) in partnership with the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA) on Taxing Mobile Money: Lessons and Ways Forward” in Accra.

Dr. Hearson said that the research found that, though there were concerns that the e-levy would affect growth in the mobile money market, this was minimal. He said that  its impact on individuals was also looked at, and it came to light that despite the fact that the tax affected the poor more than wealthier people, it was also among the more progressive taxes of this nature across Africa due to the GHC100 threshold that the government had placed on it.

He urged the government to consider revising the GHC100 a day threshold due to inflation and its effect on the value of this figure. “Ghana is among the countries that have significantly changed the tax in response to what was perceived” he noted.

Dr. Hearson emphasised that such taxes were here to stay, as 15 African countries already had these taxes and policies in place.

Speaking to the media, Mr. Charles Addae from the Ghana Revenue Authority said that the partnership with the ICTD was aimed at analysing the taxation of digitalized financial transactions in Ghana. He said that there had been challenges in implementing the E-levy. He disclosed that Ghana had realised almost GHC1.2 billion in 2023 from the e-levy, which was an increase from the GHC600 million realised in 2022.

He said that the GRA’s aim was to improve tax revenue without burdening taxpayers by considering ways to tap into the informal sector. He noted that the formal sector had always provided taxes through existing businesses and employees to raise national revenue, hence the need to tap into the informal sector.

He urged the government not to cancel the tax but to increase it to the gross domestic product (GDP) revenue of the nation in order to run it. He said that the partnership with ICTD will help the GRA determine the outcomes of the implementation of the e-levy through research.

Project Director, Retail Finance at ISSER, Ms Roselyn Otoo urged the government to partner with academia to generate the needed data to guide the design and implementation of taxation policies to minimise challenges and/or address bottlenecks.

“What we are calling for is more active collaboration, there is an appetite for research,” she emphasised.

The workshop looked at the context of the E-Levy tax in Ghana, that is, since its proposal in Ghana in 2021 and the widespread public opposition it faced. A research brief submitted by the ICTD on Mobile Money Taxation and Informal Workers: Evidence from Ghana’s E-levy (September 2023, Issue 98) noted that the E-levy tax, which placed a burden on taxpayers, could roll back the digitalization of the Ghanaian economy and could increase the hardship of workers in the informal sector already hit by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The brief made known certain considerations after its research, including the monitoring of the effects of the payment threshold introduced by the government, especially in the context of inflation, an attention to the regressive nature of the policy, as well as the cyclical relationship between low trust in government and economic neglect.

Mr Charles Addae, Ghana Revenue Authority