Lagos Taxpayers Now Three Million, LIRS Reveals

Sunday Ehigiator

The Lagos State Internal Revenue Service (LIRS) has revealed that there are only three million Lagos residents within the state’s tax net.

The service also revealed that its new established platformhad improved the state’s ease of doing business and brought about transparency and accountability within the service.

 The Assistant Director for IT, LIRS, Rasheed Olu-Ajayi made the remarks at a session with THISDAY at the weekend while explaining the benefit of the e-Tax platform.

 At the session, the assistant director said: “With the e-Tax system now in place, a taxpayer can see the trends and analysis of the payment that has been made on their behalf or that has been paid by their employer.

“In terms of the agency, the e-Tax has blocked some of the leakages within the tax net, reduced instances of tax evasion and avoidance, reduced the cost of collection, and also promoted transparency and accountability.

“Compliance has been good since we launched. We can do better in terms of bringing more people into the tax net. In terms of the population census, it says we have about 20 million people in Lagos.

“If we only have about 3 million on our Tax Net, it means even if we say that 50 per cent of the 20 million in Lagos are taxable, then we should have about 10 million within our tax net, which is not yet the case.”

Hence he said the agency still has to do a lot of work to ensure it brings more people into the tax net and ensure that all sundry has been captured.

He revealed that e-Tax has improved the state’s ease of doing business and brought about transparency and accountability within the service.

He added that the e-Tax application “is an end-to-end tax administration system that allows you do the enumeration of taxpayers, registration of taxpayers, taxpayers assessments, annual returns filing, ETCC generation, tax auditing and dashboard interactions with taxpayers.”

At the session, Olu-Ajayi said: “The latest development has to do with the bill generation which will allow taxpayers to pay for their taxes from the comfort of their homes without having to go to the bank or any of our tax stations.”

According to him, we are still using EBS for reconciliations. But the application is this e-Tax which leverages technology to create a good environment for our taxpayers while also making tax payment processes seamless in Lagos State.”

He said the e-Tax system allows taxpayers to have one unique Payer ID attached to either a BVN or NIN. So, it gives us that flexibility to be able to identify every taxpayer at the touch of a button and enables those with multiple payers ID to be merged into the e-Tax platform.

“This was why we thought of leveraging e-Tax. The benefit of the e-Tax is in two categories. We have benefits for taxpayers and benefits for the agency as well.

“Taxpayers now enjoy the ease of doing business which is one of the core principles of taxation. Taxpayers now at the touch of a button can sit in the comfort of their home to be able to transact business.”

Olu-Ajayi said the cost of compliance “has been reduced by the e-Tax system. Before now, if a taxpayer wants to object to their assessment, they need to go to our nearest tax stations, maybe peradventure has to do some photocopies of all the documents needed from them.

“With the e-Tax system now in place, they can object as all data is now digital on the e-Tax platform. They can just do their objection from the comfort of their homes.

“Also, with the old EBS-RCM system, when a taxpayer makes a payment, for instance, it takes them about 24 hours for the banks to produce the receipts.

“Hence they need to go back to the bank the next day to get their receipt. With the e-Tax, once you make payments on the platform, almost instantaneously you can get your revenue receipts.

“Also on the Issue of Electronic Tax Clearance, usually before now, people would have to write to the agency to request their tax clearance. But once you have conformed to all the payments and statutory requirements for Electronic Tax Clearance to be issued, a taxpayer can do so from the platform.”