Parliament moves to abolish the “mobile charging card” tax in the 2023 budget

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[size=52]Parliament moves to abolish the “mobile charging card” tax in the 2023 budget[/size]

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[size=45]On Saturday, the Iraqi Parliament’s Transport and Communications Committee confirmed its intention to cancel the mobile phone recharge card tax in the federal budget for the year 2023.[/size]
[size=45]The head of the committee, Representative Zahra Al-Bajari, said that “in the previous budgets, there was a paragraph to maximize the state’s resources, by deducting an additional amount from the packing card companies, but the Finance Committee and the Executive Government did not notice at the time that this value was added to the value of the card itself, and therefore the citizen pays that The value, not the company.”[/size]
[size=45]And included in the 2015 Budget Law No. (2) of 2015 what was included in Article (33/a), which stipulates (imposing sales tax on mobile phone and internet recharge cards at a rate of (20%) of the value of the cards throughout Iraq), as part of a set of procedures To ration expenses and increase revenues after the drop in oil prices in global markets and to fight ISIS at the time.[/size]
[size=45]But the mobile and internet sales tax has become an inherent characteristic and is repeated annually in all federal budget laws, as it was mentioned in the text of Article (23) for the 2016 budget, as well as in the text of Article (23/first) for the 2017 budget and in the text of Article (17/First A) for the budget In 2018, and in the text of Article (18/a) in the 2019 budget, despite the improvement in oil prices.[/size]
[size=45]Regarding this tax, Al-Bajari explained, “The Communications Committee is working to raise this addition paragraph in the 2023 budget, to return the price of the card at the price of the packing category, without the current additional amount.”[/size]
[size=45]She also indicated that "there is another tendency to establish a national company that supports the citizen and works with mobile phone companies," stressing that "this project was submitted to the current government, but it postponed it."[/size]
[size=45]With regard to landlines, the head of the Parliamentary Communications Committee noted that “the FTTH project that the Ministry of Communications is working on has begun to be completed in some areas, and we hope that it will include all cities and be at nominal prices for citizens.”[/size]
[size=45]And last January, the Iraqi Central Bureau of Statistics announced that the number of mobile phone subscribers in the country reached more than 39 million subscribers during the year 2020.[/size]
[size=45]The agency stated in a report that "the number of subscribers to mobile phone lines operating in Iraq, including the Kurdistan Region, amounted to 39.3 million subscribers," noting that "the telephone density of these phones amounted to 97.8 phones per 100 people."[/size]
[size=45]The report added, "The number of subscribers to the wireless phone lines of the General Company for Communications and Informatics (security and national) was 681.8 thousand subscribers," explaining that "the number of fixed phone lines in the Iraqi governorates except for the Kurdistan Region for the year 2020 amounted to 2.151 million lines, compared to 2.126 million lines for the year 2019 with a percentage An increase of 1.2%.[/size]
[size=45]Before 2003, the Iraqis used only the landline phone, and the mobile phone did not enter the country, and it became accessible to the willing Iraqis, except in the year 2004, and in the year 2002, there were about one million and 200 thousand subscribers to the Iraqi fixed network “landline”, i.e. an average of Four lines per 100 inhabitants, which is a lower rate than the region's rates.[/size]
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