The Chairman, Enugu State Internal Revenue Service, ESIRS, Emmanuel Ekene Nnamani has said that the agency recorded N35.9 billion revenue within seven months in 2024.
Nnamani made the disclosure while reeling out achievements of the agency to mark his one year anniversary of leading the agency.
“Our tax collection revenue started rising, this year 2024 and seven months into the year, the state has recorded N35.9 billion naira in revenue when compared to N33. 9b realised throughout the last year, 2023”, he said.
Speaking on challenges faced in the last one year, he said the agency was able to overcome them through initiatives that has brought results.
“We had to overcome establishing a new system of tax collection in Enugu which required that we digitize some aspects.
“First thing we did was to introduce the E-Ticket in the informal sector in the market, transport sector, artisan shops and street shops. That E-Ticket in the informal sector happens to be a disruptive methodology in informal sector tax collection. It does not mean that these people never paid taxes but they paid to the non-state actors who were never appointed by the government but were collecting funds which should have been collected by the government.”
He added: The E-Ticket is a new format employed in Enugu and in Nigeria as a whole because people are still shocked on how we were able to penetrate the informal sector. This year alone the organization has collected over N2.3 billion in informal sector tax collection and that is an achievement while some states are still wondering how we were able to make such a thing possible.”
According to him, “Also, when we first came into administration we realized that some areas such as PAYE were deficit. We have many companies recorded under corporate affairs but only very few of these companies remit their PAYE tax to the government. So we started asking questions and discovered that the majority of the companies domiciled in Enugu which are supposed to operate within the formal sector are operating under the informal sector. We had to separate these and explain to them where they belong..
Same goes with withholding taxes, some people did not know that some taxes go to the state and there are taxes meant to go to the federal agency and vice versa. We started with bridging the knowledge gap and informing the people.
“We discovered that you cannot collect tax in the new environment without digitizing your process. We inherited a one payment gateway which means that when it is dawn the state will not collect any money. We decided to increase the payment gateway from one to six.
Presently, we have Interswitch collecting money for the state as well as Remitta, E-Transact, Flutterwave, UPS and Moniepoint. We had to ensure that residents can pay their taxes using all the POS on the streets so we had to get Moniepoint on board all in the effort to increase convenience and ease of payment. With this the revenue started rising. Presently, the state is hitting a monthly average of N5bilion.”
According to Nnamani, the agency also revived Capital Gain Tax and the Purchase Tax which mandated hotels to remit tax from sales of drinks, accommodation among others.
“There are some dormant taxes we activated and one of such is the Capital Gain Tax. There’s a huge opportunity for the government there because the average Igbo man invests largely in landed property. We activated it at the Ministry of Land & Housing Development and Ministry of Housing, such that for every consent given one must ensure that there is a Capital Gain Tax attached to it.
We have also activated the purchase tax which has been in our law especially in hotels and other places such as sale of drinks.
On the use of GIS for Land Use Charge, Nnamani said the GIS has been expanded in all the nooks and crannies of the state.
“We have evidence that property in Enugu within the metropolis and suburban area is more than 800,000 and owners of such property are expected to pay their Land Use Charge. These are the few things we have done to ensure maximum payment and corporation by providing different means of payment to make sure nobody is stressed out.
He explained further that the Tax Clearance Certificate now has a turnaround time of 24 hours for approval after application and can be mailed to the person.
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