focus on trade facilitation, border protection and if you are NCC (Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), just regulate telecommunications. You are not set up to collect revenue.
“It can be your revenue and someone else can collect it for you. There will be more transparency because you see what is being collected and is accounted for properly. It is also a way of holding ourselves to account as to how we spend the money we collect from the people.”
Oyedele, Chair of the Committee inaugurated by President Bola Tinubu on Tuesday, said Nigeria’s tax gap is estimated around N20trn as many members of the elite evade paying the exact taxes they should remit to the government.
“As of today we have significant tax gap estimated in the region of 20 trillion or even more naira. If you focus more on the few major taxes – Value Added Tax, Corporate Income Tax, Personal Income Tax, a lot of people are not (tax) compliant, particularly the middle class and the elite, some of them are in the tax net with one or two fingers, you pay a thousand naira as tax when you should have paid N10m,” he said.
The tax expert said all of the revenue not captured before would be brought into the tax net.
“In fact, our plan is to repeal many of the taxes that currently make doing business difficult without introducing new ones and yet collect more,” he said.