The issue of slot allocated to our top politicians. Recently over 770,000 slots were allocated to the people we elected to be our leader, expected of them to distribute the slots to the qualified general public, all these slots were given on huge consideration ( average of over 400k naira) for each slot.
YES, The government of Nigeria, like others in different parts of the world, has legislative powers to impose on its citizens, any form of tax and at whatever rate is deems appropriate. One of the major functions of the government especially developing countries such as Nigeria, is the provision of infrastructural services such as electricity, schools, hospitals, pipe-borne water, good roads as well as ensure a rise in per-capital income, poverty alleviation to mention a few.
For these services to be adequately provided, government should have enough revenue to finance them. The task of financing these enormous responsibilities is one of the major problems facing the government. Based on the limited resources of government, there is need to carry the citizens along, hence, the imposition of tax on all taxable individuals and companies to augment government financial position is essential.
To this end, government has enacted various tax laws and reformed existing ones to stand the taste of time. These laws include: income tax management act (ITMA), company income tax cap C21 LFN 2004 etc.
These entire all aimed at ensuring adherence to tax payment and discouraging tax evasion and avoidance.
It was revealed in 2019 by federal Inland Revenue Service Executive chairman that Nigeria losses $14-$15 billion to tax evasion annually.
These are the reasons why most Nigerians evade tax are thus;
Nigeria economy as a number one economy in Africa and emerging economy in the world has many problems militating tax revenue mobilization as a sources of financing development activities.
1. The Nigeria tax authorities both federal Inland Revenue services {FIRS} and state board of internal revenue {SBIR]} face the challenges of widespread of tax evasion, which is motivated by a complaint about corruption and poor quality of services. Government revealed that about 75 percent of registered companies in the country are not are not registered with the stepping up its efforts to encourage voluntary compliance with a tax obligation.
2. Another challenge is that the mark-to-market (MTM) or Fair Value Accounting (FVA) of the financial instrument upon adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) would create significant swings in earnings and capital. By extension, it will affect taxable profit been reported by some management of organizations that use discretion in managing profit and tax, companies shelter their taxes at the detriment of tax authority duty of collecting taxes.
3. The national resources which most people believe to be national cake are been mis-appropriated. This discourages Nigerians to pay tax.
All those aforementioned reasons make rich citizen to be getting richer and poor citizen to be getting poorer. Are you telling me that an individual who finds his daily bread difficult will afford 200k or 300k to buy a slot to secure a job?
I think our senators should debate on the issue of allocation of slots to top politician.
Citizens that suffered to pay tax should at least enjoy 20% of the tax paid.
What do you think of the issue of tax in Nigeria, is it effective enough? Is it treated equally? Please share your view at the comment section.
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