UPDATED: FIRS extends tax amnesty for small businesses

Babatunde Fowler, chairman of the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS), has announced the extension of the tax amnesty for micro, small, medium enterprise across the country.

Earlier, Fowler had granted a 45-day tax amnesty for businesses that had not paid taxes within 2013 and 2015.

But speaking at a public-private policy dialogue with the National Association of Small and Medium Enterprise (NASME) in Lagos, Fowler said the 45-day window, which was to close on November 24, 2016, will now be extended to December 31, 2016 for small and medium scale businesses.

“I said this is a listening government, we would not like to change the conditions, however, for your members, what we will do is that we would let them apply through you, and we will give up to 31st of December,” Fowler said at the dialogue hosted by Deloitte, a tax advisory company.

“We will even accept management account, submit them through your office before 31st of December.

“In terms of the years prior to 2013, it was something I was not going to discuss, but considering it is for the small scale businesses, and micro, the years prior to 2013 will also be waved.”

This was in response to the request of the MSMEs to extend the tax amnesty for the purpose of proper auditing and filings.

Olanrewaju Oniyitan, CEO, Wholistic Business Solutions, had initially said that the MSMEs be given a year or two to file in their audited reports for the tax amnesty.

She said the MSME-friendly tax auditors are “overwhelmed with a lot of people trying to comply, and 45 days would not happen, and it is just for us to look at those number of days and see if we can extend it, in line with the recommendations”.

“Two years will give us enough time to be able to do all of that. The two year amnesty time will give us that time. How many tax professionals, even in Lagos state alone do we have; that’s one leg. The second leg is; how many MSME-friendly tax professionals do we have?

They are very small, and if we all swarm them with, ‘ok, we want to comply’, we wouldn’t finish in one year, and that is the reality.”

Seye Arowolo, partner at Deloitte, who made a presentation on behalf of the Coalition of MSME Stakeholders Public-Private Dialogue on tax regulatory policy framework for MSMEs in Nigeria, requested that businesses be taxed based on their size.

He said taxing all businesses 30 percent of their profit, will not help MSMEs develop. Arowolo suggested that micro and small businesses be taxed 2.5 percent, while medium enterprises should be taxed  five percent.

NASME also requested for tax holidays for start-ups, which contribute to the nation’s GDP.