Member of Parliament for Tema Central, Yves Nii Noi Hanson-Nortey, has advocated for the implementation of the E-levy as proposed by the government in the 2022 budget.
According to him, "the E-levy is a payment system to guarantee infrastructural development" in the country.
"Infrastructural development is not cheap...to develop the kind of infrastructure that we need, we need to take this quantum look into the future and that is what this E-levy is trying to achieve...the roads is the main task, what we currently doing on our road tolls is just about 70 million Ghana cedis, we can not do more than 70km per year, however, we are looking at a situation where we can gain as close. If not more at least 7 billion Ghana cedis which is almost close to a billion dollars, we can leverage on the back of that billion dollars for example for the next 20 years and bring in infrastructural developers to do these roads over a period of time," he said.
He said the E-levy taxation should be viewed from the perspective of contributing to the development of the country.
"If you are prepared to pay one per cent transaction fee to an entity which is a just profit-making entity, why won't you consider paying an extra one per cent to the state to use it for your own development?
"Government is only asking you to contribute a little bit more through the E-levy for your own development", he said on Joy FM's AM Show on Thursday, November 25, 2021.
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Mr. Noi Hanson -Nortey added that the introduction of the E-levy as announced by the government was due to the inability of Ghanaians to pay direct taxes.
"It is because Ghanaians are not prepared to pay direct taxes... so the government will always have to go through the indirect taxes which affects everybody.
"If only 12 per cent out of our 30 million population are paying taxes directly then how do you expect the 12 per cent to carry the 20 million population on their shoulders", he quizzed.
During the 2022 national budget presentation in Parliament on Wednesday, November 17, 2021.
The Finance Minister, Ken Ofori-Atta announced a 1.75 per cent levy on all electronic transactions, including Mobile Money and remittances to widen the tax net and rope in the informal sector.