Chairman of the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS), Babatunde Fowler has said the Service generated about N118 billion in the last 18 months through its taxation strategies.
Fowler said this at a three-day Automatic Exchange of Information foundation course for select African countries, which ended in Lagos at the weekend.
He noted that FIRS signed an MOU with the 36 states on exchange of information and in three months, it grew the tax base by close to 400,000.
“Some states grew with thousands of companies that were not registered for tax. We had a handshake with the Nigeria Customs in terms of Value Added Tax, and in the last 18 months, we have been able to get N118bn,” he noted.
He urged African countries to maximise their revenues through taxation and that the only way of doing that was for countries to exchange information.
The Global Forum on Transparency and Information Exchange for Tax Purposes, at the event tasked Nigerian authorities to take the lead in joining the Automatic Exchange of Information (AEoI) initiative to aid its fight against illicit funds transfer and low tax remittances.
Deputy President of the forum, Donald Godfrey, “Beginning in September 2017, 50 countries will begin exchanging information on financial accounts automatically, and by September 2018, another 50 will join the fold.
“So far, there is one African country, South Africa, committed to 2017 and Ghana committed to 2018. We have a number of countries that we think already have the capacity to do information exchange automatically; especially Uganda, Cameroon and Nigeria,” he said.
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