Commissioner for Finance and Coordinating Economy of Imo State, Dr Doris Anite has assured that with the reforms put in place in the state, the Imo Internal Revenue Service (IIRS) would meet its target of generating revenue within the next six months.
Dr Anite disclosed this to journalists in Owerri Wednesday on arrival from the Second Tax Annual Dialogue held in Abuja organized by the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) in conjunction with the Joint Tax Board (JTB).
The Commissioner who x-rayed the topic titled ‘Tax Harmonisation for Enhanced Revenue Generation’ stressed the need for taxes to be harmonised in order to achieve optimum utilisation.
She hinted at what she called the incentive system and advocated for proper revenue attribution in order to encourage more collaboration from MDAS.
Dr Anite assured with the deployment of the right technology in every sector in the state, the rewards in terms of IGR would soon be visible for all to see.
She said: “We are very optimistic that in the next six months we should be hitting our revenue target because we are deploying a whole lot of technology in every sector to achieve this.”
She disclosed that the IRS has just recently started collecting education levies under examination development fees through their electronic platforms.
According to her, it used to be manually collected assured that they will put their universities on a payment portal which she said is still a work in progress.
On what she met on the ground in the state as a finance commissioner and coordinator of the economy, said that her job was to take care of internally generated revenue.
She said: “So I had to engage with the MDAs. As coordinating commissioner, I could speak to anybody.”
She said: “We started by looking at their performance and what their revenue target should be based on a certain matrix that we put in place.”
She said that the essence was to determine the right taxes and who should collect what adding that to make it easy, they decided to have a central technological platform that would access and generate demand notices.
The commissioner said that the IIRS sees what is being collected and enforces compliance stating that in engaging with the MDAs, they found out that there is a willingness to support the revenue system.
She said: “The bonuses are paid only to IIRS for collection. So to the MDAs, they say I offer the services, but how come I’m not getting any incentive.”
She described the incentive system as a major area that needed to look at and come up with the right policies to encourage collection.
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