Nigeria lacks productive base to earn more dollars – Uviase

What would you advise the Federal Government to make the focus of its tax revenue drive considering the country desperately needs to increase tax revenue to service its huge debt and fund infrastructure growth?

The mantra or focus of government tax revenue drive should be voluntary compliance through participatory tax drive process. This approach requires going back to the basis and interrogating the status quo of non-quid pro quo which presupposes that tax is not paid in exchange for value.  Rather than making tax payment to be a legal requirement that must be complied with, the government should make people see taxation as a payment for something of immediate value. The government must adopt a deliberate effort for people to see some quick gains as a result of their tax payments. Let’s take the roads as an example. There must be some deliberate efforts to ensure that failed portions of the roads are fixed immediately. So, when people see the benefits and with the right socialization process, Revenue collections will be enhanced. We should adopt a mantra such as we all win when we pay taxes.

The most important aspect of revenue drive is to leverage on technology to drive the revenue generation process. As we all know, there is no meaningful transaction that can be executed outside of the banking system today. Moreso, the tax laws are structured in such a way that there are few transactions that can take place without tax payment by either the receiver or the payer or both. So, if for example you look at the transactions that flow through the banking system today and compare with the actual tax accruing, you will observe that there are significant gaps that can and should be bridged. Of course, there is a need for improvement in human capacity and the need for more transparency in government business.  There should be serious collaboration among governments departments and agencies such that the tax collection agencies will have unfettered access to information from all the other government agencies. I believe that with the right synergy tax revenues will rise remarkably.  Lastly, it is important to consider waiver of backlog interest and penalties that businesses are not able to pay. The condition for such a waiver will be the immediate payment of the principal amount. It is expected that such magnanimity on the part of government will immediately lead to the inflow of uncollected taxes that will lead to significant increase in collections and enhanced image for the revenue collection authorities.

Accounting and accountability have been a major issue in Nigeria, what advice do you have for govt and private sector players in this regard?

The challenge most businesses and government establishment have today is the urge to have quick fixes to issues bordering on accountability. This approach cannot work. The better way would be to have clearly defined policies and procedures for all functions of the business process (whether government and private) and then put in place control points to ensure that the systems are functioning properly. Finally, businesses must ensure that their monitoring mechanisms are functioning properly. This is important because no matter how well-designed systems are, the control mechanisms can sometimes fail. This is why monitoring comes in to be able to detect anymalfunctioning aspect of the systems. Always ensure that the monitoring mechanism is functioning properly.