The Kaduna State Internal Revenue Service (KDIRS) says on Friday it is set to descend on more than 10,000 companies evading tax in the state as soon as the Coronavirus crisis is over.
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The Executive Chairman of the agency, Dr Zaid Abubakar, stated this in an interview with News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Kaduna.
Abubakar said that the measure was to boost revenue generation to enable the state cope with the economic setback caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
According to him, improved revenue generation will significantly increase the state capacity to deliver critical services to the people.
He said that the agency had provided structures to ensure that every taxpayer and companies operating in the state paid the required tax due to the state.
“We are using the period of the pandemic to explore areas of synergy with sister revenue generating agencies like the Federal Internal Revenue Service (FIRS).
“FIRS has a lot of organisations and other taxpayer files, estimated to be more than 10,000 companies,which we realise, have not been paying tax to the state.
“We intend to use the synergy to look at those files and extract the needed information and go after the companies to collect our taxes,” he said.
Abubakar also said that the agency was closely monitoring organisations that were recently migrating to Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS), adding that KDIRS would go after them as well.
He disclosed that the agency had achieved 98 per cent of its revenue collection target for the first quarter of this year.
He, however, expressed concern that the Coronavirus pandemic would impact negatively on revenue generation in the second quarter, stressing that a whole month had been lost to the virus crisis.
The KDIRS boss added that the agency had announced the extension of the deadline for the filing of 2019 tax returns by two months, from March 30 to May 31.
According to him, the measure is part of the strategies designed to boost revenue generation to enable the state cope with the envisaged economic crises occasioned by the Coronavirus pandemic.
He added that there would be aggressive tax collection to ensure that all defaulting taxpayers paid their tax after the expiry of the two months deadline extension for filing of 2019 tax returns.
“More attention would be given to Pay-As-You-Earn (PAYE) and Direct Assessment (DA) where the larger chunk of our taxes come from, as soon as the Coronavirus crisis is over.
“We have already identified the areas we will be collecting our taxes based on our Revenue Collection Plan developed before the Coronavirus crisis,” Abubakar said.