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Expand tax net to shore up Nigeria’s revenue base, SWIT tells FG

The Society for Women in Taxation (SWIT), the female arm of the Chartered Institute of Taxation of Nigeria (CITN), has urged the Federal Government to expand the tax net rather than increase Value Added Tax (VAT), as a means of shoring up the country’s revenue base.

The National President, SWIT, Bosede Ikhanoba, stated this on Thursday in Ibadan at the investiture of Chief Mrs Simbiat Amure-Oduwaye as the sixth State Coordinator and inauguration of executive members of SWIT, Oyo State Chapter.

Ikhanoba noted that increasing the VAT rate will only overburden taxpayers and make the country unattractive to investors.

“They shouldn’t increase the VAT rate. What they should be looking at is how to bring everybody on board. It is a deliberate thing because almost everything you want to do now will tell you to go to a website and key in your data. That is one of the ways of bringing everybody so that when you come to file your tax return, they take your particulars and your details are already captured.

“It is not by increasing the rate of tax that is important now. Once you get everybody on board and everybody pays the accurate and appropriate tax, it will be better,” she said.

Ikhanoba further said that the society is advocating for the consideration of women in relevant tax laws and harmonisation of taxes to avoid double taxation, especially for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs).

She said, “Currently, we are looking at some aspects of the tax law that we know that women are at a disadvantage and we are looking at those in the SMEs. If you go to the markets, they pay all forms of charges which are already a burden. And the infrastructures are not there; almost every businessman or woman provides the basic infrastructure that they need and they still pay taxes.

“The government is already looking at tax harmonisation but it will take a while because though the tax policy is the same, the implementation varies from state to state.

“In the area of our advocacy, we look at what each state is paying, what each person should be paying and see how we can harmonise them so that at the beginning of the year, for a businesswoman, she will know the relevant taxes that she should pay and make an appropriate budget for them. We see a situation whereby because of ignorance, some people come under the guise of any form of tax and charge them.”

In her acceptance speech as Coordinator, SWIT, Oyo State Chapter, Amure-Oduwaye promised to continue on the chapter’s trajectory of advocating for more women to join the taxation profession and increasing the chapter’s membership beyond Ibadan to other parts of the state.

Amure-Oduwaye said, “Our chapter has a work plan, which I tenaciously hope to continue without any equivocation. The proposed action plan demands a strenuous membership drive among federal, private and state revenue members, with a view to becoming more active in the chapter’s activities.”

In her lecture on ‘Base Erosion Profit Shifting (BEPS) and the Nigerian Tax Authority,’ Professor Olayinka Adenikinju, a past Coordinator, SWIT, Oyo State Chapter, said all countries must unite to end BEPS, a practise by multinational companies to evade taxes where profits are transferred from one country to another with less tax rate as an investment.

Adenikinju noted that Nigeria needs to commit to ending BEPS “because the money that we should have gained via transfer pricing is being taken elsewhere. The country is not making as much as it should because of BEPS.

“So, all countries should come together to end it so that companies that make money in a particular country should be willing to contribute to the economy of those nations by paying the appropriate tax, not necessarily avoiding it and sending it elsewhere and paying smaller amounts.”

On tax harmonisation and expansion of the tax net, Prof. Adenikinju called for the strengthening of Nigeria’s database to identify taxpayers “because it is people that you know that you can go after. But if you don’t even know them or know where they are, how will you tax them?”

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