Binla Lambert Says Tax on Mobile Money Transaction is Broad Daylight Robbery, An Indication of Rainy And Stormy Days For Cameroon
Tax scholars will agree that a good tax is one that has the following facets; fairness, adequacy, simplicity, transparency, and administrative ease.
When you see a government come with a tax, with the sole aim being to target the middle and lower-income class individuals/families who are the vast majority that makes use of mobile money services, it only goes to tell us how unfair, complex, obscure and bureaucratic the introduction of the tax is, this is so because most of them in power, the elite class, and big guys are used to bank and credit card transactions which are a far fetch reality from an ordinary Cameroonian.
To make matters worst, the tax multiplicity in terms of recovering it will actually make a good proportion of the principal money end up as tax, as the tax is collected at both ends of the transaction (0.2 ×2 =0.4%) and across different phases if the transaction doesn’t end up only between two persons, coupled with the fact that individuals already bore the indirect VAT on every economic activity plus chargers levied by these private mobile money companies.
When you see that the only realizable project of an entire government is looking for areas where they can keep extorting her citizens all in the name of taxes, one thing is certain, either they are running dry of cash or rainy and stormy days are ahead. Under sane conditions and in an economy flourishing and doing well citizens will even be excited to pay the said tax, but the sad reality is that even after squeezing money out of citizens they will now sit and decide how to embezzle it or carry out self-centered nonproductive and nonprofitable projects in the name of “Vision 2035” thus the poverty and hardship cycle continues.
The result of such a taxation policy will be an increase in hoarding and manual transactions which comes with its own hurdles such as loss and theft of the money especially with high-level insecurity as well as harassment from some law enforcement agents, as to them every youth holding huge physical cash is a scammer.
