By Emma Ujah, Abuja Bureau Chief
The Federal Inland Revenue Service, FIRS, is to administer not more than nine taxes, the chairman of the agency, Mr. Zacch Adedeji, has revealed.
He said, yesterday, that President Bola Tinubu had given a directive to that effect, as part of his strategic plan for ease of business and to stimulate economic growth.
Adedeji spoke when the Chief Executive Officer of Guinness Nigeria, Adebayo Alli, led the management team of the company on a visit to Revenue House in Abuja.
The FIRS boss said: “The president gave a directive that he wants a single digit tax in the country, meaning that the maximum number of taxes we will have after the work of the Presidential Committee on Fiscal Policy and Tax Reforms will be nine taxes.
“For us at FIRS, we have responded to that directive. We want to grow the pie such that even if we are taking the same percentage of the bigger pie, the result will be huge.
“By God’s grace, we will not introduce additional taxes nor increase any form of taxes. We are only determined to increase the pie.
“We have restructured our operations at FIRS in such a way that we are now effectively carrying out our duty of assessing, collecting and accounting for taxes.
“We used to have functional types of taxes, but we have identified that the only customers we have are the taxpayers. We have improved the way we relate with our customers by rearranging our operations based on our customers, using their turnover as the basis to categorise them into large, medium and small.
“We did this to actually develop expertise in what we do. Secondly, to provide you with a one-stop shop for your activities. If you are in a large tax group, you only need to go to one office to pay all forms of taxes, including audit and other activities. You don’t need to move from one office to another again.
“We are here to serve you. You taxpayers are not armed robbers or criminals that we will be chasing about. FIRS is also not a law enforcement organisation. We are partners in progress.”
