The Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) would soon embark on the audit of Nigerian tax payers to boost tax revenue collection, improve service delivery to taxpayers and enhance voluntary compliance. FIRS has also put in place a consolidated Taxpayer Identification Number (TIN) data under the Joint Tax Board (JTB). The FIRS said that all tax laws that were not in the interest of the taxpayers were already undergoing a review process. Mr Tunde Fowler, Executive Chairman of FIRS, stated in Lagos in keynote at a stakeholders’ meeting on: “Tax Administration and National Revenue’’.
The stakeholders’ meeting was aimed at charting the way forward in the country’s tax administration and the challenges hindering a robust tax regime. He called on stakeholders to support efforts at repositioning the nation’s tax administration system. Fowler, who is also the Chairman of the Joint Tax Board (JTB), said that the board was determined to improve services to taxpayers at all levels. He added that taxpayers and stakeholders should support tax authorities in the interest of national development.
“The greatest challenge for any tax administration is achieving and maintaining a high degree of self-assessment and voluntary compliance by taxpayers. Studies, however, show that the extent to which an economy is able to grow sustainably and develop depends to a large extent on its ability to generate tax revenue to finance its expenditure and the efficiency of its tax system. The questions that arise from these simple statements include how to identify areas of non-compliance; how to measure the level of non-compliance; and how to address non-compliance,’’ Fowler said.
The tax expert explained that FIRS had put in place various strategies to curtail non-compliance to improve tax revenue collection on a sustainable basis. “Well-designed taxpayer services, education programmes, and creative measures can facilitate self-assessment and compliance,’’ Fowler said. He noted that the major determinant of tax compliance included changes in law, taxpayers’ attitudes to payment of right taxes and tax consultants’ offering the right advice to the taxpaying public. While reacting to the chairman’s speech, some of the stakeholders raised concerns regarding the number of taxes and levies being collected and levied by different government agencies, which were mostly not remitted completely.
