Government has reduced the Electronic Transfer Levy rate, popularly referred to as E-Levy, from 1.5% to 1%.
However, the daily transaction threshold of ¢100 has also been removed.
The Finance Minister, Ken Ofori-Atta, who announced this in Parliament on Thursday, said this will allow more Ghanaians to use the service.
The controversial Electronic Transfer Levy Act, 2022 (Act 1075) was passed in March 2022 after months of public protestations and resistance from the Minority members of parliament.
The levy was finally amended from 1.75% to 1.5% applying to electronic money transfers, including wallet-to-bank, bank-to-wallet and bank-to-bank transactions, among others.
Government officials have admitted that E-levy has failed to rake in the needed revenue government anticipated. A leading member of the governing New Patriotic Party, Gabby Asare Otchere-Darko tweeted in June that the E-Levy was doing a paltry “10% of estimated revenue” following its implementation.
In delivering the 2023 budget statement on November 24, 2022, Ken Ofori-Atta announced the “review of the E-Levy Act and more specifically, reduce the headline rate from 1.5% to 1% of the transaction value as well as removal of the daily threshold”.
“Mr. Speaker, post-COVID, we identified the need to ramp-up our domestic revenue mobilisation efforts to match the performance of our peers and finance our development agenda. Last year, we started with the E-Levy which has not yielded the resources as expected,” the Finance Minister conceded.
Meanwhile, mobile money transactions between 2017 and 2021 increased from ¢1.55 billion to GH¢9.86 billion, but the figure has drastically reduced.