{"id":21136,"date":"2026-10-10T12:16:27","date_gmt":"2026-10-10T12:16:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/interspacemusic.com\/blog\/?p=21136"},"modified":"2026-10-10T12:16:27","modified_gmt":"2026-10-10T12:16:27","slug":"ghana-mobile-money-royalty-payouts-imto-rules-label-accounts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/interspacemusic.com\/blog\/ghana-mobile-money-royalty-payouts-imto-rules-label-accounts\/","title":{"rendered":"Ghana Stopped Taxing Mobile Money Royalty Payouts. Its New Remittance Rules Bar a Label’s Account From Receiving Them."},"content":{"rendered":"

Ghana scrapped the 1 percent levy that used to come off every mobile money royalty payout in April 2025, and then wrote remittance rules that stop those payouts from landing in a label’s business account.<\/p>\n

The tax on the rail is gone. The rail itself got narrower.<\/p>\n

The 1 percent is gone, and refundable<\/h2>\n

The Electronic Transfer Levy, known locally as the E-Levy, taxed electronic transfers including mobile money and inward remittances at 1 percent, down from 1.75 percent at introduction.<\/p>\n

Parliament approved the repeal bill on 26 March 2025, with the Deputy Finance Minister putting the giveback at GH¢2 billion, according to the Ghana News Agency<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Electronic Transfer Levy (Repeal) Act, 2025 (Act 1128) took effect on 2 April 2025, and the Ghana Revenue Authority told charging entities to refund every deduction made on or after that date, per EY’s tax alert of 9 April 2025<\/a>. An E-Levy line on a 2025 statement after 1 April was collected in error.<\/p>\n

Everything arrives in cedis, converted the day it lands<\/h2>\n

Bank of Ghana Notice BG\/GOV\/SEC\/2025\/25, signed on 25 August 2025, sets how payment service providers terminate inward remittances into wallets and bank accounts. The settlement bank must convert the inflow the same day at the Average Opening Bloomberg USD\/GHS Regional bid-ask range, credit the cedi equivalent within 24 hours, and reconcile terminated funds within 72 hours, under the central bank’s updated inward remittance guidelines<\/a>. There is no hold-in-dollars option on that rail.<\/p>\n

In Ghana that is expensive. The Bank of Ghana’s first Monetary Policy Committee report of 2026 recorded a 40.7 percent cedi appreciation against the dollar across 2025, as GhanaFact set out on 2 February 2026<\/a>, and the rate moved from roughly GH¢15.56 to the dollar in early April 2025 to about GH¢10.28 by June, Ecofin Agency reported on 30 October 2025<\/a>.<\/p>\n

A dollar of royalties that cleared in June 2025 bought about a third fewer cedis than the same dollar in April. Payout timing is an FX decision.<\/p>\n

A label is not an eligible beneficiary<\/h2>\n

IMTO means International Money Transfer Operator, the licensed entity that carries money across the border before a local wallet or bank pays it out.<\/p>\n

The Bank of Ghana’s guidelines for registering and operating IMTOs<\/a>, dated December 2025, prohibit an IMTO from allowing “termination of inward remittances into business\/corporate accounts”, and require IMTO services to “primarily target individual customers and operate on a person-to-person transfer basis”.<\/p>\n

That is an operations rule, not a policy footnote. A registered Ghanaian label, publisher or management company cannot be the named beneficiary on the remittance rail most distributors default to.<\/p>\n

Three checks before the next payout cycle<\/h3>\n