The Chief Executive Officer of Ghana Chamber of Telecommunications, Kwaku Sakyi Addo has revealed that some portions of the Subah report submitted to government by the technical committee are incorrect.
“Some of the content of the report are incorrect and those content are fundamental to the conclusion drawn about the future of Subah’s work,” he said.
His comment follows criticisms by some Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) about the composition of the technical committee which according to them affected the outcome of the committee’s investigations.
The chairman of the committee, Dr. Edward Siaw defended the composition of the committee and also refuted claims that the report was a sham.
Government in November 2003 set up a technical committee to review and renegotiate the service agreement between the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA) and Subah InfoSolutions which saw the payment of an alleged GHC 144 million for no work done; an allegation the committee discounted.
The GRA contracted Subah to electronically monitor domestic call data records (CDRs) of the telecommunication companies in the country to enable the GRA collect appropriate taxes from the telcom companies.
Speaking on the Citi Breakfast Show on Monday, Mr. Sakyi Addo denied sections of the report which indicated that the telecom companies denied Subah the request to undertake an electronic monitoring, “that is not correct.”
“He disclosed that Subah was not introduced to the telecom companies by the GRA until October 28th, 2013 ‘but they were being paid already since 2010.”
He also revealed that Subah’s mandate was to work on domestic traffic in relation to communication service tax but they rather worked on international traffic after they acquired the call data records given to the National Communications Authority (NCA) by the telcos.
He therefore concluded that from all indications, Subah is either “irredeemably incompetent…or that they are fatally fraudulent…that is a problem.”
The Telecom Chamber boss lamented over the failure of the technical committee to invite the telcos to seek first hand clarification on the matter.
“If they did not do electronic monitoring and if they did not analyze call data records relating to their mandate, then what did they do to be paid GHC 74 million?” he asked.
According to him, his outfit has been cooperating with Subah as an agent of the GRA for auditing purposes adding that Subah was mandated to audit telcos “and it’s about integrity, it’s about the integrity of the signatory that says that these accounts are clean, these records are clean and so for us, we are concerned that the audit that will be done on telcos by Subah may not be credible.”
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