The Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) has urged Nigerians to always hold their elected representatives accountable for the taxes they are paying.
Director of Emerging and Special Taxes, FIRS, Mrs. Amina Ado who made this call at a programme tagged, Tax in the present day Nigeria,’ said there is a need for citizens to begin to ask their governors, their local government chairmen questions about what they are doing with the allocations they get on monthly basis from Federation Account Allocation Committee (FAAC).
The event which was organized by the Government to Citizens Interface in collaboration with the FIRS, brought together tax payers, tax administrators and government agencies.
Mrs. Ado said every month the FIRS announces how much it collected. “The idea behind that is to encourage citizens to say OK, if this much was collected and shared among the three tiers of government, what was it spent on,” she said.
She also said Nigerians will pay their taxes if budgetary allocations are tailored to solve their needs and they can see the projects.
According to her, “We need to make sure that funds are used judiciously and in a way that will reduce the cost of governance”.
“Yes its true the federal government is saddled with a lot of responsibilities, but it has to find a way to execute all these projects so that people can see them clearly. It is not just the hard infrastructure but also run the economy in a way that there will be confidence for people to invest because it is only when they invest that we can get the taxes.”
While encouraging citizens to always pay their taxes, she said tax is unavoidable. According to her, “If we don’t pay tax, the government is forced to borrow money. In 2021, the federal government received only about N4.6 trillion but it spent N12 trillion which means it borrowed about N7.3 trillion.
“That borrowing has a strain on the interest rate which businesses will pay. So businesses that don’t pay tax, in one way, they incur higher interest rates because government has to borrow. If we don’t pay our taxes to state governments we end up paying the taxes through inflation because the cost of goods will go up simply because the government is borrowing more, the CBN is printing more to fund government directly.”
Also speaking Director Inland Revenue department of the Revenue Mobilisation, Allocation and Fiscal Commission (RMAFC), Mrs. Udodirim Okongwu said Nigerians should have the courage to ask questions about government revenue is being spent by those they are entrusted to.
In her words, “The money is shared on a monthly basis among federal, state and local governments, you know how much each state or local government is receiving, each of us seated here come from one local government or the other. You can then ask them to account for what they were given.”
In his remark, the convener and Senior Special Adviser on Political Matters to the President, Mr. Bode Gbore, said the event was organized to open the channel of direct conversation between the government and citizens and that “it has proven that Nigerians are interested in making contributions to the development and well being of the nation.”