Tax: To alter the course and boost charge income, previous Chairman of the Federal Inland Revenue Service and Chairman of Lagos State Employment Trust Fund, Mrs. Ifueko Omoigui-Okauru, says Nigeria must move far from an accumulation mentality and manual expense forms, which leave space for wastefulness and spillages, and grasp computerized methods that coordinate all levels of government, with an eye to long haul monetary advantages.
According to her, “We have enough laws. I think it is a greater amount of execution. This shouldn’t imply that that laws can’t be made in strides. You can enhance the organization assess laws, individual wage charge laws, and so forth. However, even with the laws that we have, we can accomplish more. That is the reason I’m stating the level of robotization ought to be progressed. Furthermore, these are not here and now measures. It’s not a FIRS thing, or a state inward income benefit thing, it’s a national thing.
She believes that everyone must meet up to cooperate towards adding to each other, and there must be trading data to guarantee that income from assess is expanded at the elected, state, and neighborhood government levels.
When asked how she saw the issue of deducting charge and not transmitting, which is an ordinary practice in numerous associations, she said she believes it’s an issue but it ought to be managed.
At what levels? She continues; “At the relevant levels that do the monitoring. Again, the more automated your systems are, the better. If, for example, every time such monies are deducted, just like the way you get an alert when money is withdrawn from your account, there is an alert that goes to the federal or state inland revenue service, as the case may be, then that triggers monitoring. But if there is no alert, and there is no way of knowing that the company has done this, without the staff themselves speaking up, then you are leaving it to human beings. And when you leave a system to human beings, everything around the human instinct affects the outcome.”
She said probably human beings are afraid to report the company because that is where they get their salaries, they don’t want to lose that small salary, they don’t want to be sacked.
So they don’t want to give feedback to the revenue authorities on what is going on. Probably, the company happens to have friends in high places, so even if they know this is happening, they turn a blind eye.
All said and done, Nigeria should not leave its tax system to the imaginations of human beings.
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