Ghana’s foremost power distributor, Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) is in hot waters for revenue under-declaration contrary to the rules and regulations governing its revenue management.
An audit report by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) has disclosed that a whopping 33.5% of the total revenues the company collected from consumers were not declared to the regulator.
PwC says ECG collected revenues worth GH₵15.8 billion, however, only GH₵10.4 billion were declared to the regulators. This means a shortfall of GH₵5.3 billion representing 33.5% of the total collections was not reported raising transparency and accountability issues in the operations of the company.
In addition to the under-declaration, PwC further disclosed that ECG failed to comply with the cash waterfall mechanism as it did not pay other value chain players what was due them even from the declared revenue.
The analysis by PwC reveals that the company did not even disburse all the GH₵10.4 billion but only disbursed GH₵6.5 billion leaving a difference of GH₵3.9 billion.
For instance, the Volta River Authority (VRA), a major producer of power in the country received just GH₵412 million under the cash waterfall mechanism. Interestingly, the vendor tasked by ECG to collect revenues however received GH₵ 402 million during the period under review almost the same as the share of VRA.
This suggests that the vendor was given priority over the power generation entity that ensures a constant supply of electricity.
Some analysts contend that this misreporting whether deliberate or hindsight comes to confirm the age-hold inefficiencies of ECG.
The situation is deemed could have dire consequences for electricity consumers as the inefficiencies can potentially result in higher tariffs, frequent power outages, and stalled infrastructure maintenance.
In addition, such misreporting discourages investment in the power distribution sector and hence could affect industries that heavily depend on electricity in the long term.
