Tax: We’re Working For Rich To Pay More While The Poor Pay Less – Tinubu’s Aide, Oyedele

The Chairman of Presidential Committee on Fiscal Policy and Tax Reforms, Taiwo Oyedele, has said the Committee is coming up with reforms to ensure that Nigerians who are supposed to pay tax fulfill that obligation as the tax gap stands at about 75 per cent.

He also stated that the government was working to ensure that personal income tax reduces for Nigerians earning below N1.5million monthly after the Economic Stabilization Bill is passed, stating, however, that “the rich people earning N1.5 million above will see their personal income tax rise by up to 25 per cent.”

Oyedele made the disclosure while commenting as a panelist at the ongoing 30th Nigeria Economic Summit #NES30 with the theme “Fiscal and Monetary Policy Reforms: Removing Barriers to Private Sector Investment.”

According to him, a survey conducted by NESG shows that “Only 17 per cent Nigerians pay taxes as well as 30 per cent of businesses and one of the reasons is because they don’t trust government. Therefore what we want to do is to have a National portal just like South Africa where tax payment is seamless and transparent because or current tax gap is about 70-75 per cent but if we correct that and everyone pays, our revenues will be 4 times.

“Another issue about is policy gaps where we grant unnecessary waivers to some people who dont even deserve it. But the main issue remains compliance issue,”

On the incentives for businesses, Oyedele stated “That currently before the national assembly is a policy document that is targeted at reducing tax burden on businesses and once our reforms are implemented, corporate income tax rate will reduce from 30 to 25 per cent we are hopeful it comes on board in January 2025.”

He added that the lowest hanging fruits that his Committee wants to tackle is removing disincentives as contained in the Economic Stabilization Bill which is currently in the National Assembly, adding that the document has also harmonized over 60 official taxes being paid by Nigerians.

On what the monetary side is doing, the acting director, banking supervision at the Central Bank of Nigeria, Dr. Adetona Adedeji, CBN, noted that one of the innovations introduced by the Bank is to ensure a robust risk management system.

“We want a situation every bank will put in place a cyber security management mechanism to boost investor confidence and trust. While on the other side we are accelerating our inflation targeting to ensure price we have been doing a lot and what we are doing now is Inflation targeting to ensure we get price stability because without price stability we won’t achieve it. We won’t leave any step to reign.”