The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) and the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) have inaugurated a joint committee of senior and management staff of the two agencies towards the implementation of inter-agency strategies for enhancing national revenues in the telecommunications sector.
The 17-member committee was inaugurated at the NCC’s boardroom in Abuja on Tuesday. NCC’s executive commissioner, stakeholder management, Adeleke Adewolu, inaugurated the committee on behalf of the commission’s executive vice chairman, Prof. Umar Danbatta, and the executive chairman of FIRS, Muhammad Nami.
The inauguration of the committee, comprising six officials of NCC and eleven officials of FIRS, was carried out with senior officials of NCC and those of the tax agency led by its coordinating director for compliance support group, Dick Irri, who represented Nami at the event.
While inaugurating the committee, Adewolu stated that the terms of reference (ToR) of the committee include: review the memorandum of understanding (MoU) signed between the NCC and the FIRS on June 9, 2020; and carry out inter-agency interaction on the implementation of the NCC’s revenue assurance system (RAS), to ensure that it incorporates the needs of FIRS to the extent that RAS can remain the sole interface with telecom service providers’ networks vis-à-vis the tax authority’s information needs from the telecoms sector.
Irri advised the committee to take the assignments very seriously. “I would like to task you to take this assignment as a national matter as we expect the two agencies to work in harmony, collaborate effectively and have a warm handshake that will make this synergy between the two agencies a great example of collaboration between Federal Government agencies towards enhancing fiscal governance in Nigeria,” he said.
The decision to set up the committee was one of the major outcomes of the meeting between the FIRS and the NCC on March 8, 2022 organised at the instance of the minister of communications and digital economy, Isa Pantami, to discuss the request by the FIRS for data and documents from the telecoms industry for enhancing national revenues from the sector.
