We Will Focus On FIRS, Customs After NNPC– FAAC
Chairman, Forum of Finance Commissioners, Mr. Mahmood Yunusa, has disclosed that once they are done with the under remittances issue with the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), the forum will beam its searchlight on the books of the Nigerian Customs and the Federal Inland Revenue services (FIRS).
The FAAC meeting for May 2018 hasn’t been held as the states and the federal government have rejected the remittances from the NNPC citing under remittance and crooked book keeping.
Addressing journalists at the weekend, Mr. Yunusa said if the revenue agencies achieved clean books, all the contentions would be unnecessary.
On royalty collection and Petroleum Profit Tax (PPT), the chairman said, “Part of the process of strengthening the system will be to take the collection and remittance of royalty from NNPC to the Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR) while the collection and remittance of PPT will also be returned to the FIRS in line with the law.”
“This is part of the process that we are trying to strengthen and we are trying to adopt. It is there, part of the law under oil and gas, like in any other IOC, that all royalties should be collected and remitted to the federation account by the DPR; it is DPR’s responsibility.
Before DPR collects that royalty, it has to make sure that the actual amount that is supposed to be remitted is remitted. If it is under remitted, the DPR will be responsible for the shortfall and I know DPR would not want to be responsible for a shortage that they are not even aware of,” he explained.
On FIRS, he said: “If you look at the FAAC report, there was a sharp drop in FIRS’ May and June collections but there was no opportunity for us to actually engage the FIRS for them to explain to us why there was a sharp drop. I can’t remember vividly but the drop was about N90 billion.
So FIRS also needs to tell us why the sharp drop. If they think they are not being sweated too, we will sweat them up because you cannot adopt a kind of arm-chair work.”
He said possibly, FAAC may hold this week as all the contending issues with the NNPC will be resolved.
