President Akufo-Addo yesterday commissioned the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) of the National Communication Authority (NCA), as well as Revenue Assurance and Traffic Monitoring Centre at a brief ceremony in Accra.
The Revenue Assurance and Traffic Monitoring Centre, also known as Common Platform, is a monitoring platform established by the Ministry of Communications and Ministry of Finance to boost government’s revenue in the telecoms industry.
According to the President, it has become imperative to find additional innovative way to widen the country’s tax net.
The NCA and GRA will be the primary users and beneficiaries of the Common Platform on behalf of their respective ministries, and the main functions of the Common Platform will be traffic monitoring, revenue assurance, mobile money monitoring and fraud management (SIM Box Tracking and Geo-location).
President Akufo-Addo, therefore, tasked the Finance Ministry and GRA to work hard to achieve the goals.
“As we commission these two essential facilities, I am charging the Commissioner of the Ghana Revenue Authority, through the Minister of Finance, to continue to roll out new and innovative ways to broaden Ghana’s tax net,” he said.
He said his administration was in a hurry to move Ghana forward because the country had marked time for far too long.
“The time to realise the dreams and aspirations of our forebears in building a progressive and prosperous nation is long overdue; the time is now.”
According to him, Ghana’s development was directly linked to the amount of revenue it generates through initiatives such as the common platform.
Joe Anokye, Director-General of the National Communications Authority (NCA), in a remark, said with “the advancement in technology and the government’s digitisation agenda, it had become even more important than ever for us to secure our cyber space and to ensure that the goals that we have set for ourselves as a country are not derailed by unscrupulous entities within the cyber space. It’s prudent for NCA, under the Ministry of Communications, to establish the sectoral CERT to reassure stakeholders and the public of their safety within the cyber space.”
The common platform is also billed to provide government with an independent view of telecommunications transactions and statistics and deepen the capacity for verification and validation of telecommunications statistics.
Also, with its much wider scope, the common platform provides real-time telecommunications data and visibility of the evolving mobile money ecosystem while bringing with it revenue verification and fraud management capabilities, thus providing greater transparency in the telecommunications sector.
Additionally, the system would, in the areas of fraud management, manage the tracking of international call terminations, on a sample basis, to detect and report the by-passing of the legally declared routes for international traffic into Ghana and assist in blocking such numbers.
It would provide equipment which can bypass traffic information and other network elements to search and locate illegal SIM Box operators.
By Samuel Boadi