FIRS chair: Only 41m Nigerians pay tax

Of the over 200 million population in Nigeria, only 41 million pay taxes.

Chairman of the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS), Muhammad Nami, made the disclosure in Abuja on Friday at the ‘Public Presentation and Breakdown of the Highlights of the 2022 Appropriation Bill’ in Abuja.

He said that in spite of the 41 million taxpayers in the country, Nigeria still earned lower than what its counterparts across Africa generates from Personal Income Taxes (PIT).

“If you also compare that with South Africa where they have a total population of about 60 million people, with just four million taxpayers, the total personal income tax paid in South Africa last year was about N13 trillion. You can now see that these things are not adding up.

“The number of billionaires in Lagos alone are more than the number of billionaires in the whole of South Africa but yet what we generated as PIT by Lagos State was low.

“So if we don’t pay these taxes, there is no way the government will be able to provide the social amenities required, the critical infrastructure required for the wellbeing of the country,” Nami said.

He said that the total collection up to September 31 which has not been fully reconciled with the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and the Nigerian Customs is about N4.2 trillion.

According to him, oil related taxes accounted for N950 billion (22 per cent) only while the non-oil taxes generated within that period is N3.3 trillion.

“People are not willing to pay even when they are appointed as agent of collection, whatever they have collected they find it difficult to remit.

“We assume that we are a rich country, I don’t think that is correct, we only have the potential to be rich, because we have a very huge population of about 200 million.

“If you look at it from the rate of taxes paid in Saudi Arabia with a population of 60 million people, the VAT rate is as high as 15 per cent and what we have in Nigeria is just 7.5 per cent,” Nami said.

He also said that Nigeria, an oil-producing country, could not be compared to a small country like Saudi Arabia, saying “we are still not there.”