Chairman, Federal Inland Revenue Service, FIRS, Muhammad Nami, yesterday said the service collected N7.5 trillion taxes in 2022 and also surpassed the Education Tax, ET, fund target for the year with N4 billion.

Nami stated this during 2022 Tertiary Education Fund, TETFUND/FIRS joint interactive forum in Kano.

Represented by the Kano State Coordinator, Hassan Sule, the Chairman said “It is noteworthy that despite the economic headwinds, particularly from the negative consequences of Covid-19, rising insecurity and the spill-over effects of the Russia-Ukraine war on the global economy, FIRS has continued to make progress in revenue mobilization for the three tiers of government, suffice to say that the FIRS is now funding a significant portion of the Federal Account Allocation Committee, FAAC in the last two years.

“Between January to September 2022, FIRS has collected N7.5 trillion which is a significant improvement on the total collection of N6.4 trillion for the entire 2021. Non-oil taxes accounted for N4.3trillion while petroleum profits tax accounted for N3.1 trillion. It is clear that the reforms undertaken since 2020 have started yielding the desired results.

“Tertiary Education Tax also improved significantly since the beginning of 2022. We have collected N309 billion as of September 2022, which is above the total N305 billion budgeted for the full year. I assure you that we will continue to ensure that no revenue gap is left uncovered in our quest to improve tax administration with particular emphasis on full deployment of technology across our service lines and internal operations.”

The FIRS boss added that the service “is not relenting it effort towards achieving the N500 billion Education Tax fund annually target by the TETFUND.”

Earlier, in his welcome address, TETFUND Executive Secretary, Sonny Echono, said the fund placed a very high premium on attaining and surpassing the target of N500 billion set.

Represented by his Director, Human Resources and General Administration, Adamu Abubakar, Echnono applauded the FIRS for surpassing the 2022 target, noting that due to low ET in 2021, it scaled down project implementation for the year in our beneficiary institutions in 2022.

“In year 2021, the fund received an ET collection of N189 billion, which was considerably lower than the previous year’s collection. This posed a serious challenge to the intervention activities of the fund for the year 2022. We had to seriously scale down project implementation for the year in our beneficiary institutions and our internal operations as well,” he said.

Vanguard