The Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) has retrieved half of its total debts after embarking on a nationwide revenue mobilisation exercise to recover all unpaid bills amounting to GH¢5.7 billion from its customers.

The one-month exercise, targets domestic users, businesses, organisations, ministries, departments and state agencies for power already consumed from 2022 to this year.

ECG announced that it would embark on a revenue mobilisation exercise from March 20 to April 20, 2023, to recover all debts owed by all categories of customers, including state-owned enterprises (SOEs).

Consequently, the company was temporarily closing down all its administrative offices to deploy its staff to be collectors on the field during the one-month period.

However, the engineers, technical staff and the operations, as well as the customer care units, are to be at work to attend to customers.

Managing Director of ECG, Samuel Dubik Mahama, explaining the rationale for deploying all administrative staff to be collectors for the ECG said the debt situation had reached worrying levels, thus it had become important to ensure that it was improved to preserve the integrity of the company.

He said while the company had an idea about the debt situation, the picture was better painted after ECG upgraded its digitalization process, hence the need to reverse the situation before it negatively affected its operations.

He pointed out that GH¢500 million was used to offset debt of some public institutions including GH¢200m for Ghana Armed Forces (GAF), Ghana Police Service GH¢120 million among others.

According to him, ECG is considering GH¢1.2 billion tax offset using the debts of some state institutions to clear tax obligation owed Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA).

The ECG boss was confident that if all the over 4.5 million consumers with prepaid and postpaid being 50 percent pay their bills, ECG will make GH¢2 billion a month as a company.

He mentioned that at the time he assumed office, the company was making about GH¢125 million a month and recording over 100% revenue losses.

In order to curb revenue losses, he implemented end-to-end digitalization which has increased revenue significantly.

As part of the reforms, he said bulk vendors increased from 400 to over 1,000 leading to a revenue increase.

Quota vending jumped from GH¢100million to GH¢200million a month

He revealed that revenue from quota vending rose from GH¢4.6 million to GH¢13 million a day which translates into a monthly increase from GH¢100 million a month to over GH¢200 million a month.