The Shai-Osudoku District Assembly in the Greater Accra Region has taken a significant financial step by launching a mechanised billing system to generate more revenue for the district's numerous developmental needs.
The new mechanised billing system, when successful, will generate up to GHc 8 million each year to cater for the assembly's developmental needs.
Briefing the media on the new billing system at the Shai-Osudoku District Assembly in Dodowa, the District Chief Executive (DCE) Ignatius Godfred Dordoe noted with concern that the billing system inherited by the Shai-Osudoku District Assembly was outdated, unreliable, weak, and incoherent to rely and had denied the assembly the revenue needed to meet the district's developmental needs.
"The issues of revenue leakages and weak assessments reuslts in low revenue generation and ultimately affect the developmental needs of the entire district.
"As an assembly, management thought through what we could do to create an efficient and effective system that could generate the needed revenue, end low mobilisation, and help accelerate development projects in the district; hence the introduction of the mechanised billing system, Mr Dordoe explained.
Dordoe further explained that the assembly realised that its previous revenue-generating methods lacked a scientific basis and a verification systemleading to revenue loss.
The new system
With the new mechanised billing system, the DCE said the assembly invested in tablets and recruited data collectors who would be using an application on a tablet which will transfer information from the field to the assembly's dashboard, where verification and validation would be done before migrating into the database for mechanisation and printing of bills for business operating permit and property rates, as well as temporal structures.
According to Mr Dordoe, the collection of data for the mechanised billing system covered over 75 per cent of the district and was left with Asutsuare, Volivo and the hinterlands, which include Agortor, Tokpo and Kortorkor.
Unique number
He explained that, to avoid any dubious means of revenue collection, the bills and reciepts to be generated would include a number assigned to every property and business, called an account number. He said the GPS address, the electoral area and the suburb were all features that would appear on the bill. It also includes the business type, category and amount payable.
The bill has a tear-off portion where payment is made; that section will be detached for crediting purposes.
He said the new system had two reciepts, a blue reciept for the business operating permit and yellow reciept for property rates, with instructions at the back and a watermark featuring the assembly's logo, all aimed at preventing any fictitious or duplicate bills.
