About 500 prominent
Nigerians with property and trusts abroad are to be invited to determine their
tax compliance status at home.
The Finance Minister,
Kemi Adeosun, said the 500 Nigerians would be served letters from Monday to
invite them to take advantage of the tax amnesty to regularise their tax status
and avoid prosecution and fines.
According to a statement
from her office, the minister disclosed this on Saturday at a workshop
organised by the Federal Ministry of Finance, Federal Inland Revenue Service,
FIRS, and Joint Tax Board, JTB for lawyers, accountants and other professionals
in Lagos.
The names of the
affected Nigerians were compiled by the government recently as part of tax
amnesty policy under the Voluntary Assets and Income Declaration Scheme, VAIDS,
initiative.
VAIDS, an initiative of
the Federal Ministry of Finance in collaboration with the State Tax
Authorities, provides tax defaulters a nine-month opportunity to voluntarily
and truthfully declare previously untaxed assets and incomes.
The tax amnesty period
is expected to lapse on March 31, 2018.
“The first 500 letters
are ready and will go out this week,” the Minister said. “But, there are many
more.
“Receiving the letter is
not an accusation of deliberate wrongdoing” but rather a notice that the data
suggests possible underpayment and a prompt to check compliance,” the minister
explained.
“It is premature to call
such persons tax evaders as there are many reasons that taxpayers may have
failed to comply. We will only label people as real tax evaders when the
amnesty deadline expires and they have failed to regularize.
“We are sending out
thousands of letters to those in the high risk categories. But our advice is
that every person and every company should do a self-assessment and take
advantage of VAIDs to correct any under declaration, irrespective of whether
they get a letter,” she added.
Mrs. Adeosun said
government was generating lots of data, both locally and internationally, on
property ownership and other items by Nigerians.
As part of efforts to
develop reliable tax payers database, Mrs. Adeosun said government had reviewed
all companies that received major payments from the federal government in the
last five years to identify those who may have made money from government, but
under-declared.
The minister said after
the government’s tax compliance team had looked at import records and compared
the value of goods imported to the tax declarations of the importers, its
findings on the variance was “wide, disturbing and worrisome.”
On personal income tax,
she said government had reviewed property and company ownership as well as
registration of high value assets and foreign exchange allocations, to give a
sense of the lifestyles of their owners.
“We found major
non-compliance. In some cases, people declared as little as N10 million as
income, but purchased expensive property overseas and in Nigeria, registered
high specification vehicles and funded luxurious personal events, costing multiples
of the declared income,” she noted.
“We have blocked a major
loophole by using data to profile tax payers. Thus, someone owning properties
across multiple states and overseas can selectively declare knowing that tax
authority had no means of cross checking.
“This is especially the
case with overseas assets and income where state governments lacked
jurisdiction. But with the centralisation of data under Project Lighthouse
within the Federal Ministry of Finance, a major loophole has been plugged,” she
added.
The minister reiterated
the willingness of the government to prosecute tax evaders after the tax
amnesty period had elapsed.
She therefore called on
tax professionals to advise their clients to uphold honesty in the declaration
of their assets and income as well as the regularisation of their tax status.
To create awareness on
the tax amnesty programme, the minister said the federal government had
recruited and trained 2,190 Community Tax Liaison Officers, CTLOs out of which
about 1,710 have been deployed to 33 states.
The CTLOs are currently
operating in Adamawa, Cross River, Delta, Edo, Enugu, Kaduna, Kwara, Lagos,
Nasarawa, Niger, Ogun and Oyo, among others.
The CTLOs were part of
the 7,500 job opportunities the federal government said would be generated for
Nigerians through the N-Power scheme.
Noting the cooperation
between the federal, states and foreign governments, Mrs. Adeosun said they
have provided an unprecedented level of data to the Nigerian government.
These data, she said,
had allowed government profile taxpayers accurately and identify those whose
lifestyle and assets were not consistent with their declared income.
Source: PremiumTimes
