You are here: HomeNews2021 01 23Article 410080

Business News of Saturday, 23 January 2021

Source: punchng.com

Ogun expands tax net to border communities

Ogun State Governor, Dapo Abiodun Ogun State Governor, Dapo Abiodun

The Ogun State Government has said it would look beyond taxing border communities in Lagos to Ogun communities bordering Oyo, Osun and Ondo in order to achieve its N75bn revenue target in 2021.

The Executive Chairman, Ogun State Internal Revenue Service, Anthony Olaleye, said this in a presentation of the 2021 budget breakdown on Thursday.

Olaleye said the Internal Revenue Service was going to expand its net to other border states besides Lagos and would ensure every taxable resident in the state paid the appropriate tax.

He said, “If you look clearly, you’ll see that not everybody has been paying taxes as appropriate. “Looking at the area of border tax, the IRS is driven by the residency rule, meaning everyone living in the state, even if working in another state, must pay their personal income tax to Ogun state.

“But beyond Lagos, we have not really looked into other border states. We have Oyo, Osun and Ondo state. These are areas where we are really going to expand the net.”

The Executive Chairman also stated that the agency was already working with market associations and trade associations to improve tax collection for the informal sector.

According to him, a larger percentage of the Ogun State population is not in paid employment but in the informal sector.

He therefore noted that the IRS would see that persons in the informal sector also paid their appropriate taxes as they ought to.

“Our focus is not on any levy of charge. It is on the personal income tax as entrenched in the Personal Income Tax Act of 2011, particularly section 104,” Olaleye said.

He reiterated that the agency was going to ride on the back of automation and digitisation, adding that the key area the IRS was focusing on in terms of the revenue lines was coming largely from Pay-As-You-Earn and Back Duty Assessment.

“We want to ensure we do this in an efficient and transparent manner. We also want to ensure that this is done at the least cost, which is why we are bringing in the aspect of automation to really save a lot of mundane manual processes that will probably involve a lot more cost,” he added.

According to him, the agency had started gathering information from Ministries, Departments, and Agencies on all companies within the border states, leveraging automation to build the data.

Olaleye expressed confidence that the IRS would provide the funds for the state government to deliver on all the projects enumerated.

The executive chairman added that the service was also looking deeply into other areas such as pool, betting, Withholding Taxes and others.