Federal Inland Revenue to Take Over Revenue Collection from Federal MDAs

The sixty three federal ministries, department and agencies are to stop direct collection of revenue on behalf of federal government. The Federal Inland Revenue service (FIRS) will collect all the revenues, while the Ministries, Departments & Agencies (MDA’s) focus on their core duties Chairman of the presidential committee on tax reform and fiscal policy, Taiwo Oyedele on Thursday, said MDS’s were not set up to collect revenue.

He said collection of revenue by the MDS’s, is distracting their attention from performing their constitutional responsibilities.

On Tuesday, Oyedele during the inauguration of the tax reform and fiscal policy committee by president Tinubu, also said Nigeria was losing an estimated N20 trillion revenue yearly.

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According to Oyedele, Nigeria’s tax revenue was one of the world’s lowest, while its cost of collecting taxes was one of the highest.

Oyedele, chair of the committee inaugurated by President Bola Tinubu on Tuesday, said Nigeria’s tax gap is estimated around N20trn as many members of the elite evade paying the exact taxes they should remit to the government.

“As of today we have significant tax gap estimated in the region of 20 trillion or even more naira. If you focus more on the few major taxes – Value Added Tax, Corporate Income Tax, Personal Income Tax, a lot of people are not (tax) compliant, particularly the middle class and the elite, some of them are in the tax net with one or two fingers, you pay a thousand naira as tax when you should have paid N10m,” he said.

The tax expert said all of the revenue not captured before would be brought into the tax net.

“In fact, our plan is to repeal many of the taxes that currently make doing business difficult without introducing new ones and yet collect more,” he said.