BUDGET: Govt frustrated revenue targets not meeting critical funding gaps

The Securities and Exchange Commission, SEC, has expressed worries by the Nigerian government over inability to achieve its revenue targets in the midst of pressing critical infrastructure funding gaps.

The Acting Director General of SEC, Ms. Mary Uduk, made this known in a statement on Tuesday.

She explained that collaboration among relevant government agencies would be the way out to achieve these targets.

“It is clear that data and information will certainly aid the generation of more revenue and in the long run all agencies will be better for it as there will be more resources for government to carry out development

She added that data gathering and sharing would increase compliance level as well as improve revenue generation.

Read also: Nigeria generates N289bn VAT for Q1 2019, NBS report says

In her address, Minister of Finance, Mrs. Zainab Ahmed, was quoted as saying that one of the key economic policy objectives of the current administration, as contained in the Economic Recovery and Growth Plan (ERGP) was improving overall Federal Government revenues by targeting and increasing revenues from non-oil revenue sources.

Ahmed said that in the last few months major steps had been taken to address the nation’s chronic revenue challenges among which is Strategic Revenue Growth Initiatives, SRGI, formulating policies and fiscal matters, preparing annual estimates of revenue and expenditure for the Federal Government among others.

She also stated that government aims, among other goals, to increase the tax base by drastically increasing the Company Income Tax and Value Added Tax compliance, bringing additional tax payers into the tax net, and increasing Tax to GDP ratio from the current 6 percent to 15 per cent by the year 2020.

By Babatunde Alao…

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