Vice President Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia says digitizing revenue collection at the Ghana Tourism Authority, saved the Agency four times the revenue it ordinarily makes.
Speaking at the 12th and last edition of the Nation Builders Update at Cedi Conference Centre at the Department of Economics, Legon, the Vice President informed Ghanaians that most state agencies will in the coming years receive payments online through the Ghana.gov portal, to ease the process of using their services and also enable these agencies to receive money without having to physically receive cash (a process that sometimes creates room for corruption).
Providing more information on how the Ghana.gov portal will help make the process of applying for government services seamless, the Vice President said: “On this Ghana.gov website, you can apply and obtain various government services, whether you are looking for passports, tax issues, birth certificate, driver’s license, and so on. We want you to just go to one place and make an application, you can pay for the service, you can receive the service, without visiting the office, so Ghana.gov is where we are going”.
Using the Ghana Tourism Authority as a case study, the Vice President shared that the authority’s revenue quadrupled with the implementation of the election payment system.
“We piloted this (Ghana.gov) at the Ministry of Tourism in 2019. It is very interesting to note that government, because we made it electronic, and everybody had to pay for services through the electronic means, revenue at the Ministry of Tourism and Culture, improved four times, four-fold, just because we were dealing with electronic payment system.”
Dr. Bawumia was confident that the success chalked at the pilot stage was an indication of the potential of improving revenue collection once the program is rolled out in other government agencies.
