Edo to improve revenue by 80%

The Acting Chairman, Edo State Internal Revenue Service, Emmanuel Usoh, has disclosed that the state government is exploring new sources in its Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) drive  to enable it generate 80 percent of the state revenue.
Usoh who disclosed this yesterday in Benin during a stakeholders’ meeting and proud tax payers award ceremony, said the essence was to ensure that the state was independent of the allocation from the Federation Account
 He lamented that out of over four million population in the state, only 171,000 were paying tax, adding that the development was inimical to the development of the state.
 “At the inception of this administration, the IGR was N280 million monthly, with various reform programmes, aimed at eliminating inefficiency in revenue collection process and blocking all avenues of leakages, the monthly  IGR rose to over  N2 billion monthly,’’ he said
He however lamented that the IGR has dropped from the initial N2billion to N1.5 billion on the average monthly, saying that they have been able to increase it to  N1.7 billion monthly at the moment.