The House of Representatives Committee on Finance has approved a budget of N446.34billion for the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) for the 2024 fiscal year.
The committee approved the budget, on Thursday, after a budget defence session, with the by the Executive Chairman of the FIRS, Zacch Adedeji.
The budget consists of N177.44billion for personnel cost; N156.45bn for overhead cost and N112.45bn for capital expenditure.
Adedeji, while addressing the lawmakers said the budget projections were based on the assumptions of crude oil production of 1.78mb/d for 2024; crude oil price projection on the average of $77.96/b and average exchange rate of N800/1USD.
Adedeji, who stated that the Nigeria Customs Service ( NCS), Nigeria Maritime Administration and Safety Agency ( NIMASA) and the Nigeria Ports Authority ( NPA) have no statutory mandate in revenue collection, said plans are on to have the FIRS as sole collector of government revenue.
According to him, “revenue is not core mandate of Customs. Customs is about border and trade facilitation. So when you have single window, all what you say Customs collects because the real pricncple of single window is that everything coming to the country is in advance notified. So, you know the number of container coming, volume, what is there and you know the amount and they pay you once. By that when you do that, the Customs collecting this and that or the NPA collecting also, this would go.
“If you go to UK or South Africa, you don’t see Customs Customs collecting revenue. They are merged. I am not saying it is bad. But it is not the duty of FIRS to be approving payment for roads. I don’t have people who would monitor whether that road is done or not.
“So my duty is to access, collect and account for all revenue due to Federation. So any other job may be good and laudable but that is not my core duty. So, the same things happens when you see a lot of other agencies collecting revenue. And that is when you see leakages.”
Furthermore, the FIRS boss attributed revenue leakages to lack of verifiable data, noting that” one of the major things we are doing which hopefully in the next two weeks max or one month, a law would be sent to the House to change that all Nigerians must have one single number of identification which by law today is NIN. The plan is to make sure everything we do as citizens is linked directly to this NIN. This would help address issue of tax leakage.”