The Nasarawa State generated N16.8 billion as Internal Generated Revenue in 2021, the Executive Chairman, Internal Revenue Service, Mr Ahmed Yakubu Muhammad, has said.
Speaking in an exclusive interview with Daily Trust in Lafia, the state capital, Muhammad declared that the government will arrest any person trying to deprive or frustrate its plan to generate revenues across the 13 local government areas.
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He explained that the government had banned the use of manual receipts and introduced a central billing system to check fraud.
“We have arrested scores of people who have been depriving the government of revenue from the people in the state.
“We have a platform that we use, which is called the Central Billing System (CBS). If you make any payment on the central billing system, you can print an online receipt,” he stated.
The IRS chairman, who said he was not satisfied with the revenue generated in 2021, reiterated the service commitment to increase the revenue of the state.
“Am not satisfied even if it is a trillion that we made because I want to do more. I want to make sure that I increase the revenue of the service.
“We want to improve in our collections because when we came into office four years ago, the highest that was generated was N6 billion and today we are generating N16.8bn so there is an improvement. And we will continue to improve on it,” he added.
He identified some challenges including fake state tax agents visiting clients, poor attitude of people in paying their taxes, and the lack of compliance with tax regulations.
