By Christiana Ekpa
The Executive Chairman of the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS), Zach Adedeji, on Wednesday disclosed that the collection of revenue by over 60 government agencies is a major cause of leakage of funds.
Adedeji said this duty should sole responsibility of the Service to ensure greater accountability in the system.
He spoke when he appeared before the House of Representatives Committee on Finance, chaired by Hon James Faleke, for a bugdet hearing.
He was of the opinion that other revenue collection agencies of government should focus on their various core mandates.
He advocated for a single window method of tax collection to make the process less cumbersome and check the loss of government funds.
He said one of the challenges facing this was lack of verifiable data in the country.
He said a law would be sent to the National Assembly to ensure all Nigerians have one single number of identification.
He said, “We are doing a lot of reforms including the single window because if you look at FIRS, what we collect mainly is company income tax. The problem we have is that we do not have verifiable data in the country. So one of the major things we are doing which hopefully in the next two weeks or one month maximum, a law would be sent to the House to change so that all Nigerians must have one single number of identification which by law today is NIN. The plan is to make sure everything we do as citizens is linked directly to this NIN. This would also help address issue of tax leakage.”
Adedeji said the Services was given a mandate to collect the sum of N10 trillion based on the Medium Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF) that was passed in 2023 which was reviewed upward to N11 trillion during the year.
He said the Service was able to deliver N12.3 trillion as the revenue collected for the year 2023 which was 11 percent above the target set by government.
He said the performance was a result of the internal reform that they embarked upon and the favourable economic policy decision by the President.
The FIRS Boss said the mandate of the Service for 2024 through the MTEF is to collect N19 trillion which is an additional N7 trillion compared to what was collected in 2023.
He said the bulk of it is coming from positive projection from oil and gas revenue.
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