The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) has been asked to provide the information on the turnover of MTN, GLO, Airtel, 9 mobile and other service providers to determine the actual levy they are supposed to pay to the Nigerian government.
The House of Representatives Committee on Finance issued the directive on Thursday at the interactive session on the 2022-2024 Medium Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF).
The lawmaker flagged the projected revenue from the operating levy submitted by the commission.
The NCC had proposed N82 billion as the operation levy for the year 2022.
However, at the hearing, Sada Soli (APC, Katsina), questioned the representative of NCC, Yakubu Gontor, on the Solution Assurance System.
The lawmaker said the operators only declare what they want to the NCC as their turnover.
Mr Gontor is one of the officials reported by PREMIUM TIMES to be enmeshed in the N122 million fraud.
According to Mr Soli, NCC can generate over N2trillion if it deploys the system.
He explained to the committee that the operators have been shortchanging the country by declaring whatever they wish as their revenue.
Section 3 of the NCC annual operating levy regulations provides that “every licensee that is a network operator shall pay to the Commission an annual operating levy assessed at two and a half percentage of licensee’s net revenue for the relevant period being his gross revenue less its roaming, interconnect and bandwidth cost for the period.
“The point is that they are not part of the assessment, they (telecom operators) will just declare a figure and determine what they want to pay and NCC ignorantly takes it.
“If they deploy this system, they can generate up to N2 trillion. They know. Because there is so much vested interest in this revenue assurance solution and people are attacking it and the government is not in getting this thing done, otherwise, we can generate up to N2 trillion on this. I can prove this if given the opportunity to do that.” Mr Soli said.
Responding to Mr Soli, the NCC rep said the system has not been procured yet, adding “That is what we are trying to achieve with the revenue assurance system so that we can also have an independent record of all their revenues. So that by the time they send in their self-assessment and bring in their audited account, we already have all the records of their revenue also.
“You know we said we want to use the revenue assurance system to collect data but right now the system is yet to be deployed. The basis of assessment now is the figure they have in their audited account.
“We work based on trends that we observe, which is dependent on the average revenue per user that the operators declare, and we also use their subscriber base. We use those parameters to project into the coming years, to be able to come up with a reasonable amount as the annual operating levy that is due. It is a thorough analysis that we do.
The Chairman of the committee, James Faleke (APC, Lagos), while reacting, asked Mr Gontor to provide the committee with the data on subscribers of the major operators.
In his response, Mr Gontor said, “MTN has about 52million subscribers, Glo is about 20 something million subscribers, I don’t have the exact figure. Etisalat is about 9million, after they had their issues, their subscriber base dropped. Airtel is about 25million subscribers,”
Mr Faleke further said that, “So in all, we have about 100 million subscribers who in a day must make a call once, at an average of N3. Do you have an idea of the turnover of MTN last year? Do you also have what was paid as tax, of what NCC made from MTN?
Following the inability of the NCC official to provide the details required, Mr Faleke said, “You have to give us a comprehensive list of the turnover of all the operators, the amount paid or realised by NCC in each of these operators for three and half years.
“You are to give us comprehensive data, so that we can look at it and agree on your proposal, to see if it is realistic or is good for Nigeria.”
(Premiumtimesng)
