The Nigeria Revenue Service (NRS) says the full adoption of e-invoicing will revolutionalise tax collection in the country by promoting real-time transparency, minimising fraud and aid economic planning.
The project manager for the implementation of e-invoicing in NRS, Mr. Mohammed Bawa, who disclosed this in Abuja on Tuesday at an NRS E-invoicing compliance workshop and stakeholder engagement jointly organised by NRS and Etransact, also informed that NRS has set a three year plan, up to January 2028, for the full implementation of the e-invoicing.
The workshop was organised to sensitize taxpayers on how to transition from manual invoicing to e-invoicing.
Bawa said the NRS is aware that the implementation may not go smoothly as planned hence it has segmented the implementation in three stages starting with the large taxpayers, then medium taxpayers and then the emerging taxpayers.
According to him, “For complete transition, we are looking at precisely January 2028.
“Within the last one year, we’ve been speaking directly to only large taxpayers and organizing so many engagements for them to ease the adoption process.” He said according to the timelines, we started with the large taxpayers last year and by April thisbyear full enforcement will start.
“We are giving attention to medium taxpayers in 2016, those with turnover between N1 billion and N5 billion. We will do stakeholder engagements for them for three months, then we’ll do a pilot for another three months before we can announce the go-live from July 1, 2026, and enforcement January-March 2027.”
For the Emerging Taxpayers those whose turnover is below ₦1 billion, Bawa said their own engagement starts from January to March 2027, pilot rollout April-June 2027, go-live July 1, 2027, and enforcement January-March 2028.
“We are doing all that because we know that the transition from manual to electronic is not going to be that easy. It may not be as smooth as we think, that’s why our focus for now is how to support taxpayers on how best to comply and how easily they can comply.”
He noted that with respect to infrastructure, the NRS is fully ready. According to him, “We have bought additional servers to address connectivity issues, data storage issues. We will continue to improve the system, increase the capacity, address some of these challenges until we arrive at our destination.”
He said NRS has accredited so many service providers, including Etransact, that will be there for the taxpayers when they’re having any challenges. ”That’s why we are always advising taxpayers to leverage on the services of these service providers, because they have undergone the accreditation process, and we believe they are in the best position to support the implementation.”
Also speaking, Executive Director at Etransact, Abubakar Achimugwu said he does not foresee any taxpayer having challenges with the e-invoicing process because, according to him, it is seamless and very user-friendly, regardless of one’s literacy level. “This will also be protecting the average Nigerian from multiple taxes”, he said, adding that this is because as the taxpayer is imputing and processing, he is getting a notification saying exactly what he has paid for and documenting that process as well.
“We’ve actually been doing this with the Nigerian Revenue Service, when it was called the Federal Inland Revenue Services. We have been the major platform that has been in all the revenue collections of the country, especially on the VAT front, which has been very exceptional,” he said.
He promised that his company will continue to deliver seamless service to the country.