The Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) is targeting N1.8 trillion Value Added Tax (VAT) collection for the 2017 fiscal year.
Its Executive Chairman, Tunde Fowler, made the projection at his 2017 budget presentation to the Senate Committee on Finance during budget defence.
The FIRS chief told the committee that the budget focused on capacity to increase VAT and other non-oil revenue.
He noted that principally, VAT is expected to grow from N828 billion to a budget of N1.8 trillion which is over 125 per cent increase.
He also told the committee that the achievement of the 2017 budget will be driven largely by VAT collection.
He said: “The Service, in realisation of this responsibility and challenges of doing manual collection, have automated VAT collection for the critical sectors of the economy notably telecommunications, airlines and financial institutions.”
Fowler said the deployment of the platforms is at no cost to the Service while the consultants will only be rewarded on incremental revenue generated.
He told the committee that the Service proposed to collect tax revenue target as derived from Federal Government 2016-2018 Medium Term Revenue Framework (MTRF) for 2017 amounting to N4.89 trillion.
Fowler said the budget for oil revenue dropped by nine per cent over 2016 ‘actual’ due to low oil price that operated in the year.
On budget parameter, the FIRS chief said the 2017 projected cost of collection of N153.44 billion is higher than the 2016 approval estimate which stood at N143.90 billion.
The figure, he said, represents a cost of collection increase of 6.63 per cent on overall projected non-oil revenue including VAT, stamp duties and levy.
Fowler urged the Senate to approve “the surplus budget of N848billion arising from an expected total revenue of N153.4 billion over expenditure of N152.6 billion.”
On the revenue projections performance for January to June 2017, the FIRS chief said the analysis showed that the Service has recorded an increase of N224 billion representing an overall increase of 14 per cent in 2017, when compared with the collection performance for the corresponding period of last year.
“We have therefore achieved 72.93 per cent of our half year target of N2.44 trillion for 2017 as against 74.2 per cent of N2.1 trillion for the corresponding period in 2016.
He put tax collection between January to June 2017 at N1,782,922,600.000 with variation of N224,140,900,000 giving 14 per cent increase of the same period in 2016.
He said: “The chairman may note that we attained this collection performance despite several challenges, as we have continued to vigorously pursued our strategies internally wile improving collaboration with relevant stakeholders to boost our collections.
