The Cross River Revenue Service (CRIRS) said it will allocate N35 billion from the state’s internally generated revenue (IGR) to fund the proposed N250 billion 2024 budget.
The Executive Chairman of CRIRS, Prince Edwin Okon, gave this hint in Calabar during an interactive stakeholders’ session.
The two-day session with stakeholders is aimed at educating tax practitioners in Cross River State on best practices.
According to him, “the $35 billion is only from internally generated revenue. For every budget, you have internally generated revenue, other sources like FAAC, the money you get from international funding, grants, and all other types of revenue sources that come in to make up that budget figure.
“The governor, in his wisdom, has proposed a budget size of N250 billion, which is with the state house of assembly, and we as internal revenue have a target of contributing N35 billion to that budget without necessarily making life difficult for Cross Riverians.
“A lot of people are not in the tax net. In our last meeting with Mr Babatunde Fowler, there was a revelation that we have 100,000 dormant taxpayers.
As a service, we have identified 17,000 of those numbers, and we are going to start a conversation with them, which is one of the strategies for 2024 to build confidence in them and see how we can bring them back to the tax net because people will pay tax when they have confidence in the government, he said.
He assured Cross Riverians of dividends from tax payments in 2024.
On his part, the CEO of Lani Group, Mr Ani Bassey Eyo, stated that in revenue collection, there’s a need to link tax revenue collection to public finances and the expectations of citizens, stressing that it is important for citizens and revenue authorities to engage to identify where the problems exist and propose solutions.
“We have bigger microeconomic issues that are not just peculiar to taxation; however, I think the state government needs to invest in a computerised tax system, a proprietary system that ensures that revenue points, even when administered by tax consultants, are all on a technology platform.
We should get to a point where the governor can sit in his office and see on his dashboard money that has been paid across the state account, he maintained.
Mr Ani, who is a facilitator at the session, said, “We will be training the consultants on ethics. From what I’m seeing, a lot of the consultants we are using in this state may not be professional tax people, so we need to build their capacity so they understand that it’s not just about the commission; it’s about giving service, and taxation is about service delivery.
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