Lawrence Nwimo, Awka
Anambra State Government has stated that it would ban the services of Moniepoint in the state.
Ikengaonline learned that the statement followed reported cases of financial rascality and fraudulent activities of the coordinators in the state.
Recall that the State Government had engaged the services of Moniepoint to assist in collecting taxes from the residents.
The Executive Director in-charge of operations and other revenue in Anambra State, Christian Madubuko, stated this while addressing journalists in his office, shortly after security men arrested two suspected coordinators of the Moniepoint in Awka, the State capital on Friday.
He said that one of the suspects Mr. Ndubuisi Anadi, Moniepoint Coordinator in Anambra State, was arrested over alleged financial rascality and removal of the state government payment system.
“These issues of Moniepoint are complex.” You are in Anambra, and you must have heard a lot of stories about people paying their taxes, and the taxes are not reflecting in the government account.”
“So we have been asking them what has been going wrong?
“You can imagine that a Keke operator will pay N2,500 naira, and only N50 naira will hit Government account and the rest of two thousand, four-hundred and fifty naira disappears without trace.This is a fault and we can’t accept .We want the money paid by Anambra indigenes to be used to develop the State.
“We will fight it to the end. We want the money paid by our people to be used judiciously, and used for the purpose it was paid for.
“We will use these people to set example for those who would want to be funny in the future.
“And I can tell you that we are cancelling instantly the services of Moniepoint in Anambra State,” he said.
He also stated that there are a lot of strange stories everywhere in the state about the activities of Moniepoint in relations to taxes and we don’t know which one is true.
According to him, the government wants to know who configured those PoS and for what purpose that the government doesn’t get the money paid by the residents.
He said the intention of the governor to digitalise the system was being sabotaged by the people within the system.
“We want to get to the roots of this problem and treat them accordingly,” he stated.
Madubuko further said that Mr Anadi will be charged to court soon.
On his part, the Moniepoint Coordinator, Mr Anadi, said the company received several notifications of the payment made by tax payers that did not reflect in government account.
According to him, it was a glitch in the system whereby transaction will hit Moniepoint platform but will not reflect at the Central Processing System.
When questioned about removal of government payment system, he accepted that they removed it without due notification to the government, lamenting that it was removed due to the huge loss recorded by the business owners.
