Federal Inland Revenue Generates N1.5trn in Q1 2019

• Federal Inland Revenue Generates N1.5trn in Q1 2019

The Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) continues to exceed expectations in the first quarter of the year as the agency reported 11 percent increase in the non-oil revenue.

Babatunde Fowler, the Chairman, FIRS, disclosed this in New York on Saturday.

He said FIRS realised N1.5 trillion revenue in the first quarter with taxes from the non-oil sector rising by 11 percent when compared with the corresponding quarter of 2018.

“In the first quarter (of 2019), what I will say is that in the non-oil sector, we generated 11 percent higher than what we generated in 2018.

“Basically, we have generated about N1.5 trillion,” Fowler told news agency on the sidelines of a high-level meeting on illicit financial flows hosted by the United Nations General Assembly.

According to him, the revenue generated in the Q1 2019 is 28 percent or N330 billion better than the N1.17 trillion filed by the agency for the same period of 2018.

The Q1 revenue also represents 18.7 percent of the agency’s target, N8 trillion, for 2019.

He said, “It is quite realistic as long as we have the cooperation of taxpayers in addition to deployment of technology.

“We have already started the enforcement of over 50,000 accounts that have banking turnover of 100 billion and above that have not filed their returns.”

The Chairman further explained how the agency plans to up Value Added Tax in 2019.

“We will get more people into the tax net and deploy more technology.

“We have what we call Auto VAT Collect, and that basically assists taxpayers at the point of transaction, and the VAT portion is sent straight into the federation account.

“So, we know that there is more room for growth in the VAT sector,” he explained.

Meanwhile, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) on Monday released economic report for the first quarter of 2019, the economy grew by 2.01 percent, slightly lower than the 2.39 filed in the final quarter of 2018 but higher than the 1.89 percent recorded for the same quarter of last year.