The Federal Government has said that the 774 local governments will benefit from the 35% Electronic Money Transfer Levy provided for in the Finance Bill 2022, debunking insinuations that the revenue will be shared by only the federal and state governments.
The Minister of Finance, Budget and National Planning, Mrs. Zainab Ahmed, made this clarification while responding to questions from journalists during her public presentation of the breakdown of the 2023 budget in Abuja.
According to her, the Public Finance Bill provisions align with the Strategic Revenue Growth Initiative introduced in 2019 to optimally explore all revenue generation options for improved funding of the yearly budgets.
Ahmed said: “Moving on to the Strategic Revenue Growth Initiative, the initiative, of course since 2019 when we launched it, is designed to improve our revenues from both oil and non-oil sources and I must say that we have achieved remarkable results in the implementation, especially in non-oil revenues.
“We have also seen significant improvement in revenues from the Nigeria Customs Service and very significant improvements in revenues from the Government-Owned Enterprises. We also need to remind us that this administration and this is the fourth year has adopted a practice or a tradition of using the Finance Bill to support the implementation of our annual budgets.
“In consistence with this practice, the 2022 Finance Bill has a focus on ensuring tax equity and a couple of provisions that will ensure tax equity including being able to clarify that 35% of the electronic money transfer levy is also to be shared with the local governments. When the Act was passed, the mention in the Act was the States were excluding the local governments. This is just to emphasize that the sharing includes the local governments”, the minister added.
She pointed out that the Bill had a second focus which is climate change and green growth which is designed for government to implement more fiscal reforms to reduce gas emissions and to also to support and facilitate domestic and international investments in climate adaptation and mitigation and enhance opportunities in green growth and job creation.
Ahmed further explained that another focus of the Bill was on job creation and economic growth and that this provision in the Bill was designed to implement very important public procurement reforms that “will enhance government priority expenditures.
In addition, the minister said the implementation would help the government “to also fund on sustainable basis the multilateral institutions that Nigeria belongs to in order to qualify for increased funding and other reforms from the multilateral agencies and to complement, of course, the ease of doing business in the country.”
