The Lagos State Internal Revenue Service (LIRS) has deployed an electronic payment remittance platform aimed at increasing monthly consumption tax revenue to N1 billion. Executive Chairman of LIRS, Mr. Ayodele Subair, disclosed this while speaking to journalists on the launch of the platform last week.
He stated: “This remittance system is aimed to help in the various sectors such as the hospitality sector, restaurants, events centres, and night clubs and bars, and have access to all transactions irrespective of their location. “We want to improve on the efficiency of our collection of consumption taxes.
So we have decided to leverage technology in other to increase efficiency and reduce the amount of leakages in the system, we need to apply technology and that is why we are launching this initiative.”
He stated that last year they got between N200 million and N250 million a month, but anticipated that before the end of this year, they will be looking at N800 million to N1 billion with the application of this technology.
According to him, the state has lost a lot of revenue due to inefficient administration of taxes which mostly comes from lack of sincerity of the operators.
He also blamed the leakages on tax collecting organisations not truthfully declaring their true sales and also collusion with the officials of the tax authority to undermine the accruable revenue.
