By John Ameh
The Executive Chairman of the Inland Revenue Service, Mr. Tunde Fowler will today respond to a query issued to him by President Muhammadu Buhari over discrepancies in revenue collection in the last three years.
Buhari issued the query through his Chief of Staff, Abba Kyari, expressing his dissatisfaction with the FIRS’ generation of revenues during the time under review.
It would be recalled that the FIRS was lauded by the federal government for generating the largest revenue in the nation’s tax history when it collected N5.3 trillion in taxes in 2018 and is targeting N8 trillion in 2019.
The query titled: “RE: Budgeted FIRS Collections and actual collections” reads: “Your attached letter (FIRS/EC/ECW/0249/19/027 dated 26 July 2019) on the above subject matter refers.
“We observed significant variances between the budgeted collections and actual collections for the period 2015 to 2018.
“Accordingly, you are kindly invited to submit a comprehensive variance analysis explaining the reasons for the variances between budgeted and actual collections for each main tax item for each of the years 2015 to 2018.
The query marked “Restricted” added that “we observed that the actual collections for the period 2015 to 2017 were significantly worse than what was collected between 2012 and 2014. Accordingly, you are kindly invited to explain the reason for the poor collections.”
The president’s Chief of Staff directed the FIRS boss “to respond by 19 August 2019″ (today).
In January 2019, Executive Chairman of the FIRS Mr. Tunde Fowler announced in Lagos that the Service broke its collection records by generating N5.3 trillion from taxes collected and is targeting N8 trillion for 2019.
According to Fowler, the N5.320 trillion collection is considered to be the highest revenue ever generated by FIRS in history.
The highest in FIRS was N5.07 trillion generated in 2012 under Ms. Ifueko Omoigue.