Kabul residents say a 10 percent tax on phone credit, layered on top of rising unemployment and the soaring cost of food and other goods, is deepening their economic strain. They say 10 Afghanis are deducted from every 100 Afghanis of credit purchased, and five Afghanis from every 50, but no one seems to know which sectors this tax actually funds. For many families, they say, even that payment is becoming hard to afford, and it has pushed up the cost of using telecom services altogether.
Speaking to the Hasht-e Subh Daily, several residents called for transparency over how much revenue the tax generates and how it is spent. They noted that the tax was originally introduced with the promise of lowering internet prices, a promise that never materialized: telecom costs remain as high as ever. They want the Taliban to disclose exactly how much has been collected and where it goes, and, absent a clear justification, to reconsider reducing or scrapping the tax altogether.
Asad (pseudonym), a Kabul resident, said the 10 percent tax on credit cards, combined with separate deductions made by telecom companies, has driven up the cost of phone services for ordinary people. Given the state of the economy, he said, many people simply cannot afford it, and even a five percent cut is too much for some families. Even though the tax draws from millions of users, he added, nobody has ever been told which sectors the money supports or what services it funds.
“When money is taken from people’s credit as tax, there should be clarity about exactly where it goes,” Asad said. “People’s finances are in bad shape. Ten percent is not a trivial amount, and plenty of people can’t even manage five percent. On top of that, telecom companies deduct money under various pretexts, so in the end people are paying far more than what actually lands in their account.”
Shamsullah, another Kabul resident, said the Taliban are not accountable for the taxes they collect from citizens, leaving people in the dark about where the money ends up. That lack of transparency, he said, has eroded public trust in the entire tax collection system. With incomes low and living costs climbing, he argued, the Taliban should either cut the tax or, at minimum, give the public a full accounting of what has been collected and how it has been spent.
“The problem is that people don’t know how this money is collected, where it’s spent, or what services it covers,” Shamsullah said. “At a time when people’s daily and monthly income is so low, taking 10 percent off phone credit adds even more strain. At the very least, citizens deserve to know where that revenue goes. Anyone who pays a tax has a right to know that.”
Masouda, also a Kabul resident, said telecom companies pile additional charges on top of the government’s 10 percent tax, deducting further amounts from users’ accounts without clear explanation. Each time she has asked, she said, the company has offered a different excuse, often blaming some service supposedly active on the SIM card. Combined with the government tax, she said, these extra deductions have made phone service noticeably more expensive.
“This is genuinely a serious problem, and I’ve dealt with it firsthand,” Masouda said. “I used to have an MTN SIM card registered through my school, and 50 Afghanis were deducted from my account every month. I’ve had this SIM card for two or three years now, and if I buy 500 Afghanis of credit, 50 Afghanis go toward SIM card fees and another 50 toward tax. So to actually have 500 Afghanis of credit, I end up paying 600. Given the state of the economy, that’s a lot of money. On top of that, telecom companies sometimes make extra deductions, and when you call to ask about it, they just say some plan is active on your SIM. It would help people enormously if this tax were reduced.”
The Afghanistan Telecom Regulatory Authority (ATRA), which operates under Taliban control, said in February 2021 that revenue from the telecom services tax had exceeded four billion Afghanis in a single year, with total revenue from the tax reaching roughly 22.3 billion Afghanis between 2015 and 2021.
The Taliban’s Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT) had separately reported that the tax generated about one and a half billion Afghanis in the first four months of the Afghanistan solar year 1400 (2021).
You can read the Persian version of this report here:
مالیه ۱۰ درصدی کریدیتکارتها؛ باشندهگان کابل: پول ما کجا مصرف میشود؟
