President of the Association of Small Business Owners in Nigeria (ASBON), Dr Femi Egbesola, has lamented the inefficiency of the Nigeria Revenue Service (NRS) Tax ProMax.

Speaking with journalists, Egbesola urged the agency to fix the challenges associated with its portal.

He expressed disappointment that a process that should aid business compliance has, instead, become a burden to them.

The NRS Tax ProMax is supposed to help businesses file their company’s complete data on the portal, including registered name, registration and tax identification numbers, revenue and so on, which is then used to calculate tax payable at the end of the month and year.

He expressed that instead of being a seamless tool to aid businesses, it had continued to be a burden on businesses, stressing that the agency was not up to date with its obligations.

He said: “The portal is not seamless as we were promised; it is extremely frustrating. I do not know what the challenge is. Maybe there are a lot of users trying to use it at once, or it is overwhelmed, or maybe they have not just perfected the technology yet and are still working on it. I do not know.

“However, what I do know is that it is not working as it should and it should not be so, as they had enough time to perfect it for use before rolling it out.

“Banks’ software has many more users and data on them and they work seamlessly daily; I would expect that of the federal government to work far better. Since it was launched about two months ago, businesses have been complaining that the portal remains unresponsive most of the time, ‘freezes’ both day and night and is generally very poor, yet, no response.