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The Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) has projected N1.8
trillion Value Added Tax (VAT) collection for the 2017 fiscal year.
Its Executive Chairman, Tunde Fowler, made the projection
yesterday at his 2017 budget presentation to the Senate Committee on Finance
during budget defence.
The FIRS chief told the committee that the budget focused on
capacity to increase VAT and other non-oil revenue.
He noted that principally, VAT is expected to grow from N828 billion to a budget of N1.8 trillion
which is over 125 per cent increase.
He also told the committee that the achievement of the 2017
budget will be driven largely by VAT collection.
He said: “The Service, in realisation of this responsibility
and challenges of doing manual collection, have automated VAT collection for
the critical sectors of the economy notably telecommunications, airlines and
financial institutions.”
Fowler said the deployment of the platforms is at no cost to
the Service while the consultants will only be rewarded on incremental revenue
generated.
He told the committee that the Service proposed to collect
tax revenue target as derived from Federal Government 2016-2018 Medium Term
Revenue Framework (MTRF) for 2017 amounting to N4.89 trillion.
Fowler said the budget for oil revenue dropped by nine per
cent over 2016 ‘actual’ due to low oil price that operated in the year.
On budget parameter, the FIRS chief said the 2017 projected
cost of collection of N153.44 billion is higher than the 2016 approval estimate
which stood at N143.90 billion.
The figure, he said, represents a cost of collection
increase of 6.63 per cent on overall projected non-oil revenue including VAT,
stamp duties and levy.
Fowler urged the Senate to approve “the surplus budget of
N848billion arising from an expected total revenue of N153.4 billion over
expenditure of N152.6 billion.”
On the revenue projections performance for January to June
2017, the FIRS chief said the analysis showed that the Service has recorded an
increase of N224 billion representing an overall increase of 14 per cent in
2017, when compared with the collection performance for the corresponding
period of last year.
“We have therefore achieved 72.93 per cent of our half year
target of N2.44 trillion for 2017 as against 74.2 per cent of N2.1 trillion for
the corresponding period in 2016.
He put tax collection between January to June 2017 at
N1,782,922,600.000 with variation of N224,140,900,000 giving 14 per cent
increase of the same period in 2016.
He said: “The chairman may note that we attained this
collection performance despite several challenges, as we have continued to
vigorously pursued our strategies internally wile improving collaboration with
relevant stakeholders to boost our collections.
THE NATION
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