Joint Tax Board targets 45m tax payers by Q3’19
By Babajide Komolafe & Monsuru Olowoopejo
The Joint tax Board (JTB), yesterday, said it aims to achieve tax base of 45 million people by the end of the third quarter of this year (Q1’19).
Chairman, JTB, Mr. Babatunde Fowler, disclosed this during the South-West flag-off ceremony of the Tax Identification Number (TIN) Registration System and Consolidated National Taxpayers Database.
Speaking on the benefits of the new TIN registration system, Fowler said: “We believe that the new system will reinforce the laudable efforts of this administration towards building a robust tax-revenue administration system, promoting a tax-friendly environment and ensuring a sustainable and inclusive economy for all Nigerians.
“We are confident of this because the last four years have seen a number of modest milestones in tax-revenue administration, some of which include:
Expansion of the tax base from 10 million to 20 million taxpayers with the potential for an increase of up to 45 million before the end of the third quarter of 2019; Growth in Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) of states by 46.11 percent from N800.02 billion in 2016 to N1.16 trillion in 2018; Growth in FIRS collections by 53.81 percent from N3.30 trillion in 2016 to N5.32 trillion in 2018, with the 2018 total collection of N5.32 trillion being the highest collection ever in the history of Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS), while Non-Oil Revenue, with a collection of N2.85 trillion, accounting for 54 per cent of total revenue collection.”
Fowler who is also the Chairman of FIRS added that the new system will ensure that taxpayers’ information is available whenever and wherever it’s needed.
He stressed that the system possesses the capability to integrate with relevant agencies and leverage on already captured data, deploy analytics to discover underlying and correlating trends and patterns that could lead to increased IGR for all tiers of government.
The agencies, according to him, include Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC), Nigeria Customs Service (NCS), Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS), Federal Road Safety Commission (FRSC), Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS), Nigeria Identity Management Commission (NIMC) and Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC). “This would significantly reduce the burden of manual taxpayer information management and by extension grossly crash the cost of collection,” he added.