Share The Tax Burden!

Since January 1, 2022, Cameroonians have been introduced to a fresh procedure of sending and receiving money via their mobile telephones. This follows an unprecedented 2 per cent tax levied on electronic money transfers contained in the 2022 Finance Law deliberated upon in Parliament and voted by Parliamentarians before its promulgation into law by the President of the Republic. It fulfilled all the conditions to be a piece of law which therefore has to be applied indiscriminately; the ignorance of which is no excuse to whoever.
Tongues continue wagging on the new legal instrument which incidentally puts more liquidity into the State coffers judging from the volume of transactions through electronic money. Understandably so because Cameroonians since embracing the innovative digital money transactions over a decade ago only had charges to pay decided by the telephone operators. That the tax adds to the charges and more so seen to be double makes many uncomfortable with the option. The amount might be negligible to some especially when they compare similar taxes in certain countries but for others, there is no objectivity in the whole operation.
The latter school of thought are almost going away with the impression that introducing a tax on mobile money transfer, which ostensibly goes in line with fiscal reforms to enlarge the tax base, weighs heavily on the population whose purchasing power is already weak. Striving to fetch as much fiscal revenue as possible, especially targeting hitherto untaxable areas like electronic money is logically good but ‘forgetting’ operators who observably make fortunes from the business remains mindboggling. When one considers that the volume of mobile money operation in the country in just one year totalled FCFA 10,883 billion from about 10 million mobile money accounts, then one begins to imagine what government losses by either not taxing the operators or putting a clear percentage of what goes into the State coffers. Government...