VAIDS: Nigeria’s Tax Net Records 36% Growth In 12 Months, Says Osinbajo

Abuja said the nation’s tax net (the number of economically-active tax paying Nigerians) grew in excess of five million or 35.7% from 14m in May last year to over 19 so far, helped by the Voluntary Assets and Income Declaration Scheme (VAIDS).

VAIDS is a 12-month amnesty window, aimed at growing the tax net by allowing Nigerians at home and abroad to regularise their tax status by declaring and paying taxes on all previously undeclared income and assets, without the fear of investigation or prosecution. One of its goals is to raise Nigeria’s tax-to-GDP ratio from the current 6 percent to 15% by 2020.

Declaring open the 20th conference of the Chartered Institute of Taxation of Nigeria (CITN) in Abuja, Osinbajo said the feat, among others, was achieved an unprecedented push “to rewrite the tax narrative in Nigeria, to ensure that everyone, citizens, businesses, investors, tax professionals, governments, all derive maximum benefit from the system.”

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For him, the easy argument that Nigeria should wait until economic growth and development brings informal players into the formal systems and then the tax net is unhelpful. Such attitude, he said, is responsible for keeping the country on the same spot for decades.
“It seems to me that we must find a way of fixing this car while the engine is running,” he stressed.

The nation, he continued, has carried on as an oil-rich country, one without the need for its citizens’ taxes, while urging those who care to pay whatever taxes they can for decades. In exchange, government, he continued, got the right to do as it liked with Nigeria’s oil wealth, fueling “massive corruption and inefficiencies that have come to be associated with public revenue management.”