08 July 2022

Telecommunications operators in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) are refusing to pay the new taxes imposed on them by the Regulatory Authority of Posts and Telecommunications of Congo (ARPTC).

The first invoices sent via the consulting firm 5C Energy amount to circa US$20m for the period from March 24 to mid-May 2022.

In a statement on Tuesday, June 7 DRC’s national chamber of commerce said the new tax threatens to squeeze the sector, which already has taxes well above the average in sub-Saharan Africa. “All operators in the Congo have rejected these invoices as irregular and therefore unenforceable,” the statement said.

The dispatch of these first invoices follows the application of Decree No. 22/11 of March 9, 2022, setting the terms of calculation and rates of income from the services of the ARPTC. This new tax replaces the Mobile Device Registry (MDR) tax, which was abolished on March 1, ending an annual levy on telephone credit recharges introduced by ARPTC in September 2020.

The new tax is expected to cost telecom operators US180m per year. To cope with this, they said that they had no choice but to “increase the tariffs of various services on which the government has decided to apply these new charges”. According to the telecom companies, the government’s measures could push back investors in addition to unnecessarily increasing the burden on households in an already difficult socio-economic context.