‘Nigeria needs proper data, accountability to achieve competitive tax system’

For Nigeria to achieve a competitive tax system, the need to address issues on data, information and accountability has been emphasized.

President and Chairman of Governing Council, Chartered Institute of Taxation of Nigeria (CITN), Adesina Adedayo, said this ahead of its yearly conference, with the theme ‘Global Disruption, Taxation and Digitalisation: Implications for socio-economics development’, slated for May 17 to 20, in Abuja.

Even as stakeholders have called for overhaul of the tax system to plug revenue leakages and country’s corruption index, he said what Nigeria needed now was proper accountability system, in which the institute is coming up with position papers to address the menace.

He said Nigeria needed to up its ante not to become a failed state.

According to him, “There is the need for identification before venturing into plugging leakages. By that way we identify, adopt and account for revenue leakages. People are relocating their businesses abroad. Nigeria needs to wake up. We need to change our process, stability model and governance style,” he said.

Speaking on the impact and benefit of the conference, he said: “The benefit of the conference is to let Nigerians know that with the way economic and business models have changed, tax administration and practice must also change. Unlike before when we wait for people to have a physical office before we tax them, virtual offices are now getting more economically viable than people think.

“With the global disruption, it is clear that we do not need physical interaction anymore to make money, which has caused us to have a discussion about it and how we do business around it. On how tax comes into all these, it comes from administration to practice. These will form our fulcrum for this year’s conference.”