The Federal Government is committed to doubling Nigeria’s tax to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) ratio from its current six percent to 12 percent by the year 2020.
The Minister of Finance, Mrs Kemi Adeosun, said in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in New York that Nigeria was among the lowest tax-paying country in the world.
The minister had earlier participated on a panel that discussed ‘Revenue Leakages: Illicit Financial Flows’ at the Platform for Collaboration on Tax Conference at the UN Headquarters, New York.
Adeosun said: “We’ve made it the focus to improve our tax to GDP ratio from six percent where it currently is to move it up into a spare for other African countries.
“Ghana has 15 percent, South Africa has 24 percent. Most developed countries have 30 percent. So Nigeria’s six percent is very low.
“So we need to correct that and we’ve driven a number of initiatives to do this. We shared that with the panel.
“We shared some of our challenges with the panel and we got some very good advice and support which would be taken back to Nigeria to implement”.
She said, however, that there was still a long way to go adding, “We are not satisfied yet until that figure is significantly moved from where we are in today”.
“As I said, we’ve set ourselves a target, we want to pursue that aggressively and all the revenue generating agencies especially FIRS – Federal Inland Revenue Service.
“States Internal Revenue Service is being equipped to really take on that task and we expect that to yield a result,” she said.
The minister had also held a private meeting with the Head of Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development Global Forum on Exchange of Information, Ms Monica Bhatia.
The meeting focused on Nigeria’s efforts for developing international networks and collaboration with other countries to secure taxpayer information.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hw2AANG_B0]
