A senior official of the Ministry of Finance has disclosed the signing of the agreement of Ghana’s Single Window Project saying, President Mahama’s administration has signed a single-sourced contract with West Blue Consulting Ghana Limited to execute the project.
[contextly_sidebar id=”VJO7Zkmyq4J7nJNKXSAqPnnae7ab4QQ3″]Speaking to journalists today under intense pressure from probing questions, Citi FM’s Richard Dela Sky spoke to the Head of the Tax Policy Unit of the Ministry of Finance, Anthony Dzadra who responded to a question on the Presidential directive that asked the Ministry of Finance to engage West Blue on a single sourced contract.
According to him, the contract was signed based on several meetings to arrive at the decision and that the Minister of Finance was not just instructed by the President.
“If you want to do single-source procurement, you don’t have the power so the public procurement authority had a role to play in the process. There were reasons that were approved by the PPA who gave the go ahead.” he explained.
However, the Ministry could not tell how much tax cedi will go into paying for the services of West Blue Limited, let alone disclose the duration of the engagement.
Already, West Blue’s software has been deployed at the Headquarters of the Customs Division of the Ghana Revenue Authority as part of preparations to roll out the Single Window Project by September 1 this year.
During a tour of the facility built to host the operational room of the CEPS personnel who will run the Single Window project, West Blue Chief, Valentina Minta, was available to answer questions from the Media.
On the issue of cyber security, West Blue Chief, Valentina Minta said cyber crime is ongoing and therefore, proactive measures have been put in place to ensure that every aspect of the project is protected.
According to her, cyber security cannot be compromised, thus, her outfit has a lot of audit checks with controls in place to ensure that the work in being monitored.
“One of those for example is showing that you don’t have task allocated to one person so the system randomly distributes the work. Secondly, we make sure that we use secure sockets, layers to encrypt the data. We also have a lot of firewalls and data security at the data base level and the application level and also looking at it at from the web level so we’ve ensured that we have everything covered,” she explained.
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By: Farida Shaibu/citifmonline.com/Ghana