Efficient Tax Payment’ll Improve Governance

BY TONY EKE
THE Delta State Governor, Dr. Ifeanyi Okowa, has called for collaborative engagement between the state government and the citizens in order to improve governance through tax payment.
Speaking at the sensitization and launch of biometric technology to facilitate tax payment, organised under the aegis of the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) and the Delta State Board of Internal Revenue (DBIR), Governor Okowa said such synergy was imperative as governance was a collective enterprise.
Represented by the state’s Head of Service, Mr. Reginald Bayoko, he urged the entertainment practitioners such as musicians, actors, comedians and disc jockeys (deejays) to key into the biometric initiative and pay their taxes to empower the government to deliver socio-economic programmes to the populace.
He expressed appreciation to the FIRS for the choice of Delta State as a base for the introduction of the biometric initiative and called for its sustenance in order to ease tax payment by the category of persons in the entertainment industry.
On the insistence of the entertainment practitioners on the provision of basic facilities to enhance their engagements as a prelude to payment of tax, he urged that the first step was for them to pay their tax even as he further likened it to the practical reality of the egg-and-chicken scenario.
Earlier, the Executive Chairman, FIRS, Dr. Babatunde Fowler, represented by Mr. Kola Okunola, had described the entertainment industry as a huge provider of jobs and major contributor to the nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), noting that the entertainment industry was instrumental to the rebased Nigeria’s GDP which as of 2013 stood at $510bn.
He called for the stimulation of the economy to address the poor payment of tax payment in Nigeria, and lamented that despite Nigeria’s huge population, it only collected a paltry $27bn compared to South Africa’s $57bn for 2015.
Also speaking, the chairman of the DBIR, Chief Monday Onyeme, stated that the quest for aggressive tax collection had become inevitable due to the dwindling revenue accruing from the federation account, noting that the desire to bring the entertainers into the tax was for common good.
He stated that the introduction of the biometric initiative will be less burdensome and reduce paper work and thus facilitate the payment of taxes.
Onyeme stated that musicians were utilised as point persons because of their pivotal role in influencing social behaviour, since according to him, “ entertainers exert so much influence on the society which is the reason people tend to take a cue or imitate some of the things these persons do”.
Stakeholders in the entertainment industry such as the Delta State Chairman of the Performing Musicians Association of Nigeria (PMAN), Mr. Quincy Tebite, aka Tiso Tiso, and the leadership of the Actors’ Guild, comedians and deejays, said while payment of tax was desirable, there was need for the government to provide basic facilities to promote and help them remain in business.
Officials of Domino Technology which comprised a Nigerian and two Swiss explained the mode of operation of the new biometric during the demonstration segment in which a tax payer put a call and paid his tax without physical contact.