FIRS Rakes N8.5trillion Tax Revenue In Eight Months- Ex-Chairman Nami
The Immediate past Executive Chairman of the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) Muhammed Nami said the agency collected a total of N8.5trillion tax revenue in cash between January 1st and September 14th, 2023
Nami spoke at the handover ceremony to the Acting Executive Chairman, Zach Adedeji held in Abuja on Monday, stating “The FIRS set new collection records in 2021 and 2022. The service is currently contributing over 70 per cent of the revenue being shared monthly by FAAC.
“The Service is on track to set yet another record in 2023 as it collected over N8.5trillion (cash) from 1st January to 14th September and have assessed, reconciled and recovered over N4 trillion outstanding tax liabilities and sequestered funds from NNPC on behalf of the Federation.
Nami said the total sum of over N12 trillion is exclusive of amounts invested by the taxpayers under the Road Infrastructure Tax Credit Scheme and tax implications of waivers by the Government from January 2023 to date.
“During the inauguration of the erstwhile Board Members of the Service, I promised to raise the country’s Tax-To-GDP ratio from 6 per cent to 10 per cent in four years. We already have achieved a Tax-to-GDP ratio of 10.86 per cent within two years (i.e. as of 1st December 2021.)
“It may interest us to know that our projected total 2023 tax collection is a minimum of N15 trillion and a projected tax to GDP of nearly 14 per cent by December 2023. Certainly, the projections by the current government of tax to GDP of 18 per cent in another four years is not only realisable but can be surpassed.”
The Chairman stressed that the environment he met on ground in 2019 was characterised by weak administrative structure, inefficient processes (mostly manual), adversarial labour relations, insufficient funding with serious funding gaps, in addition to mutual mistrust between staff and management.
“The net effect was low staff morale, the Service struggling to fulfill mandate, suboptimal performance, inadequate revenue to prosecute government programmes and low tax-to-GDP ratio.
“My administration embarked on broad reforms focusing on the following goals: Administrative and Operational Restructuring. The main objective of this goal was to properly align functions for seamless woworkflownd, ultimately, efficient service delivery. In order to achieve the set goal, we effected proper staffnplacement, devolved FIRS’ administrative structure into 7 Groups, created new functional units, established industry-based tax offices and decentralised audit and investigation functions.
Nami said automation of tax administration processes by the agency achieved the goal by the usage in-house capacities to develop and deploy the Taxpro MAX which had been in use since 2021.
The Taxpro MAX is a landmark success considering that the legacy iTax system that was procured at huge costs did not operate beyond the pilot stage.
As of today, the automation programme is delivering online TCC, an automated VAT collection system and integrated tax payment amongst others.
To create a customer-focused organisation to prioritise and satisfy taxpayers’ demands, he said the Service installed a 24-7 Call Centre to attend to enquiries.
In addition, the Service instituted very effective process for collaborating with stakeholders. The result is a tax environment devoid of needless disputes and enabling voluntary compliance.
“Making the Service data-centric In order to achieve data-inspired decisions in the Service, we created the Intelligence and Strategic Data Mining & Analysis department to source, analyse and disseminate data for tax operations. The data provided by this function greatly enhances the quality of tax compliance and enforcement activities.
He said the implementation of these measures greatly improved the output of the Service and specifically resulted into the turn-around time for tax operations which reduced significantly.
The Service secured ISO certification for some of its processes.Improved voluntary tax compliance.”
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