Nigeria now has 19m tax payers – Osinbajo

Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, on Wednesday said that Nigeria has increased its tax net from 14 million in May 2017 to 19 million this year. He made the revelation while declaring open the 2018 edition of the Chartered Institute of Taxation of Nigeria (CITN) conference. The Vice President was Special Guest of honour at the event.

He acknowledged that paying tax is not exciting to anyone but added that it was an argument on whether one should pay taxes or enjoy dividend of governance.

“Earlier, I noted that as of May 2017, only 14 million economically active Nigerians paid taxes. I am pleased to note that the number is now in excess of 19 million and still growing. This means that efforts led by the Federal Inland Revenue Service in collaboration with many of the states inland revenue services have already added more than five million new tax payers to the tax base.

“But there is still a lot of work ahead of us; as Nigeria races to catch up with the rest of the world in terms of tax compliance we all have a role to play in this,’’ Osinbajo said.

According to him, in reality it should not be debated as compliance and good governance should exist side by side as the head and tail of a social contract that binds citizens and government.

He said it was difficult to explain the cynicism displayed by Nigerians about governance and about fulfilling their tax responsibilities.

“Governments generally have the nonchalance of fulfilling their own part of the social contract, noting that Nigeria had experienced the Aba and Abeokuta tax riots incidentally both championed by women.

“The moral is a simple one that when citizens pay their full share of taxes they take more than a passing interest in how they are governed and how public funds are utilized and accounted for,’’ he stated, adding that government had relied more in the past on oil revenues than on taxation adding that a decline in taxation depicted a decline in government’s accountability and ability to deal with the needs of the people.

Poor tax management according to him was one of the issues that increased corruption in the system and that the fact remained that the tax payer was less tolerant of corruption than another who failed to pay.

“We have aggressively expanded the implementation of the TSA and IPPIS both designed to ensure that public funds are transparently managed and spent. In the process we have succeeded in proving that process reforms are only as good and effective as their implementation.

He hailed other policies implemented by the Federal Government to help shore up the economy. “The Presidential Initiative on Continuous Audit (PICA) has also tightened controls on federal payrolls and pension systems elimination tens of thousands of ghost workers and saving us more than N200 billion that would have gone to these ghost workers,’’ he added.