With its newly deployed electronic payment remittance platform, the Lagos State Internal Revenue Service (LIRS) is targeting additional monthly revenue of N1 billion from consumption tax.
The Executive Chairman of Service, Mr. Ayodele Subair, disclosed this to journalists at the venue of the launching in Lagos.
He explained that the remittance system was designed “to help in the various sectors such as the hospitality sector, restaurants, events centres, and night clubs and bars, and have access to all transactions irrespective of their location.
“We want to improve on the efficiency of our collection of consumption taxes. So we have decided to leverage technology in other to increase efficiency and reduce the amount of leakages in the system, we need to apply technology and that is why we are launching this initiative”, the tax expert added.
Subair, who disclosed collections from consumption tax last year was between N200 million and N250 million a month, projected that before the end of this year collections from the source would hit between N800 million to N1 billion with the application of this technology.
According to him, the state has continued to suffer revenue shortfall due to inefficient administration of taxes which mostly comes from lack of sincerity of the operators.
The LIRS boss attributed the leakages in tax collection to corporate entities’ failure to declare their actual sales as well complicity of tax officials which collectively undermined accruable revenue to government coffers.
He expressed optimism that the deployment of the e-payment platform would curb abuses and promote transparency in fiscal relationship between government and corporate entities in the state.
