Nigeria: A nation pauperised by tax evasion vanguardngr.com vanguardnews
In 2017, the World Economic Forum ranked Nigeria 125 out of 137 countries in its Global Competitiveness Report. The WEF survey found that Nigeria’s potential for structural change was impeded by inadequate investment in infrastructure, technology, higher education and innovation.Nigeria has long depended on oil as its economic mainstay with paltry attempts at diversification over the years. But a recent Bloomberg report finds that this one-source revenue base is unsustainable.
During the FIRS Stakeholders Engagement Forum organised in Lagos at the time, she maintained that the much vaunted case for economic diversification would gain little traction without a steady pipeline of alternative income sources such as taxation: “We have engaged in a process of increasing our non-oil taxes. Every Nigerian wants to see us depend less on oil, and more on the other resources of the economy.
Year 2017 saw only 214 people in populous Nigeria paying taxes above N20 million. During a parley focused on economic growth jointly organised by the Nigerian Stock Exchange and Bloomberg, then Minister of Finance Kemi Adeosun emphasised that Nigeria’s infrastructural deficit could only be addressed through a national culture of consistent tax payment: “We have just 40 million active tax payers out of an estimated 69.
In Nigeria where tax evasion has become second nature, the direct implication is that government is not able to generate enough revenue to fulfil its statutory obligations to the citizenry. Earlier this year, the Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project released a report indicating that the failure of the Nigerian government to enforce Capital Gains Tax on over $8 billion oil and gas assets sold to Nigerian entities fuels poverty, underdevelopment and inequality in the country.
As of June last year, the federal government announced it had realised a total of N30 billion from the initiative, which spanned July 1, 2017 to June 30, 2018. FIRS boss Fowler said one of the outcomes was the growth of the national taxpayer database from under 14 million pre-2016 to over 19 million in 2018.
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