Guardian

IT is no understatement to conclude that the Nigerian treasury leaks like a sieve. Nor is it news how the national purse, now nearly empty, has been reduced to floating on its leaked or stolen content.

That the nation’s book-keeping is sloppy and leaves room for so much corruption is illustrated by the disclosure not too long ago by none other than the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS), that even banks, collection agents, do not make full or timely remittances into the national coffers.

This spectacle of robbing the country at all possible points is at the root of inexplicable wealth for a few and abject poverty for the majority. It explains Nigerians’ poverty in the midst of so much endowment, a scourge which is unacceptable and must be abated.

In the course of the House of Representatives’ Finance Committee’s investigation of tax remittances by banks, the acting Chairman of the Federal Inland Revenue Service, Kabir Mashi, disclosed that an audit of 23 banks for the period between 2006 and 2012 revealed that the banks were expected to have collected on behalf of FIRS a total sum of N83 billion, while the amount remitted was N77 billion. Mashi attributed the shortfall to delays in remittance by some banks. Consequently the committee gave the chief executives of the 21 surviving banks one week’s notice to appear before it to assist in the “investigation.”

At the scheduled meeting, Committee Chairman, Abdulmumini Jibrin then excoriated 10 bank chiefs who neither turned up nor sent any representative. He gave them one more day to appear after which the committee would issue a bench warrant for the arrest of anyone who failed to comply. But the representatives of 11 banks that honoured the invitation were given forms to complete, in which they were expected to state how much their banks paid as taxes in their individual capacity as well as what taxes they collected on behalf of FIRS.

The above account leaves much to be desired. Firstly, the invitation notice of one week was rather short. Secondly, as a full-time legislature, which has witnessed no interruption since 1999, House Committees are expected to carry out their constitutional oversight responsibility continuously and to produce at least one assessment report annually on agencies under their charge. For waiting since 1999 and deciding to investigate the goings-on at FIRS over the last seven years, the committee has culpably left room for the delays in tax remittances by banks to go unchecked for too long. Thirdly, wearing the obvious signs of having loafed away for over one decade, the committee approached the investigation rather sloppily. It is unclear if the committee simply took Mashi’s verbal presentation for the aforesaid 2006-12 FIRS audit. Otherwise the audit document should show at a glance the amount of taxes collected and remitted by banks year-by-year. In which case, the invitation notice to the bank chief executives should have been accompanied with that hard piece of information. That way, those who turned up for the learning would have been fully armed for the business at hand. It is not enough for any long-idle and unprepared House Committee to fulminate and threaten brimstone as in the instant case.

On its part, FIRS owes Nigerians convincing explanations about the nature of the tax collection arrangement that it has struck with the banks. Apart from its country-wide scope and the involvement of all banks, the arrangement should ordinarily be similar to the practice by any company that collects revenue through dedicated bank accounts opened with selected banks. Under such an arrangement, it is expected that when FIRS issues cheques or calls in tax accruals at mutually agreed intervals, the banks will have no choice other than to comply.

So could the instances of delayed tax remittances and clear failure by FIRS to mete out sanctions on defaulters be as a result of laxity on FIRS’s part, or that at least maybe some FIRS officials are secretly transacting fixed deposit deals with part of the collected taxes for purposes of earning interest for corrupt self-enrichment? Or is there any loophole being exploited by the banks? Should the former be the case, the House Committee should not go the suspected way of other committees of the National Assembly by settling for part of the spoils in order to cover up the mater or part of it. All culpable parties should be exposed, prosecuted and severely punished. If, however, the latter is the case, the loopholes should be promptly blocked.

Generally, at a yearly average of about N12 billion, the tax revenue collected by all banks on behalf of FIRS is on the very low side. The National Assembly should therefore expedite action on the Bill prepared by the Joint Tax Board in order to boost the tax takings. Also all tiers of government should devote available revenue to providing necessary public services so as to check the high incidence of tax avoidance and tax evasion.