LIRS: e-Tax Has Enabled Transparency, Accountability in Lagos
Sunday Ehigiator
The Lagos State Internal Revenue Service (LIRS) has revealed that the e-Tax platform launched on October 1, 2019, to simplify tax payment processes for taxpayers, has improved the ease of doing business in the state, and also brought about transparency and accountability within the agency and taxpayers
Assistant Director for IT, LIRS, Rasheed Olu-Ajayi stated this during a recent interview with THISDAY Newspaper.
According to him, “the e-Tax application is an end-to-end tax administration system that allows you to enumerate taxpayers, allows you to do registration of taxpayers, taxpayers assessments, annual returns filing, correspondence, ETCC generation, tax auditing, and dashboard interactions with taxpayers.
“The latest development which has been done on it 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.”
He said the e-Tax system allows taxpayers to have one unique Payer ID which is 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.
Also, “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. So 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 also been reduced by the e-Tax system.
According to him, “before now, if a taxpayer wants to object for 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. But with the e-Tax system now in place, they can object as all data is now digital on the e-Tax platform. So they can just do their objection from the comfort of their homes.”
