Shai-Osudoku Assembly embarks on new revenue mobilisation strategies

The Shai-Osudoku District Assembly (SODA) in the Greater Accra Region has adopted new revenue mobilisation strategies to seal the loopholes in revenue leakages that have thwarted the assembly’s efforts in higher revenue collection for many years.

As part of the new strategy, the assembly has commissioned a team of 44 field revenue mobilisation officers to capture the data of every property in the cottages, villages, and towns throughout the district in order to have correct database for the assembly to enhance revenue mobilisation.

The 44-member team, divided into three zones, each has a tablet to capture data, including the names of businesses and their written values, which will help generate data for fee fixing for the assembly.

Revenue leakages

At the commissioning of the team at the Business Centre of the SODA at Dodowa last Wednesday, the District Chief Executive (DCE), Ignatius Godfred Dordoe, made it clear that with the new strategy, revenue leakage would cease and all loopholes would be blocked.

According to Mr Dordoe, the district assembly took the bold decision to establish a revenue database, which is most scientific and would actually go into the history of SODA.

Ignatius Godfred Dordoe (arrowed), District Chief Executive for Shai-Osudoku, with the team 

He explained that when he reported as the new DCE last year, when the new government took over power, there was no database and what existed was just disjointed data; as a result, the assembly had not been able to actually determine the true state of the assembly’s revenue.

He said in order for the assembly to succeed, it brought in a seasoned rating officer who had been in the system and done the work for many years to guide the assembly in shaping the revenue.

“And so, what we are doing now is to pick all businesses, companies, buildings, properties, kiosks and everything, register them and put them into our comprehensive database.

Based on that, we can determine their rate and serve them with bills.

“In fact, as part of my key performance indicators (KPIs) as DCE, I am supposed to ensure that I mobilise enough resources and out of that, 20 per cent must go into physical projects.

The question is, how do you spend 20 per cent as you don’t know how much you have on the field?

That is why it is quite important that we do this scientific work to have reliable scientific-based data that we can rely on to serve our residents’ bills,” Mr Dordoe explained.

The DCE revealed that the assembly had also found out that certain unscrupulous individuals had been making money at the expense of the assembly, which goes a long way to thwarting revenue mobilisation efforts by the assembly.

‘’Some of them go to the field and serve bills that had not been generated by the assembly.

Just this morning, somebody forged my signature, forged a letter from the assembly and sent it to a quarry demanding materials from them.

This is the extent of the horror and crisis in which we are as an assembly and so without scientific data on the field, we would not have accurate data to work with’’, he stressed.  

Printing bills

He said the field officers have fees fixing resolution on the tablets and so immediately you see a property owner or business and put a name on it and describe it, automatically ratable values of the bills will be captured.

He said the assembly intended to print its own bills in order not to fall on external partners to print the bills for them because printing from outside was saddled with corruptions and as a result, the assembly would not be able to get the necessary values. 

The DCE, Mr Dordoe, explained that it was the plan of the assembly to increase its revenue by 40 per cent, which it was targeting between eight to nine million Ghana Cedis this year if all the revenue mobilisation strategies yielded results.

He, therefore, pleaded with the media to help in the education of the general public in the district, adding ‘’we have begun our part of the education by announcing our plans at all community centres in the district as well as our mobile van going round with the information including playing of our giggles.

He gave an assurance that the new system of revenue collection is transparent and open such that anybody who has a challenge could come to the office for redress.

He also assured the revenue-collecting field workers that those who excel during the period of the exercise would be retained by the assembly as revenue collectors.