Nami: FIRS generated N4.2 trillion in first nine months of 2021

Muhammad Nami, executive chairman of the Federal Inland Revenue Services (FIRS), says the agency generated revenues worth N4.2 trillion in the first nine months of this year.

The senate had in January, approved an upward review of the revenue target for the FIRS from N5.076 trillion in 2020 to N7.61 trillion in 2021.

While speaking on Arise News on Wednesday, Nami noted that the FIRS would have met its N7 trillion revenue target by now but for the challenges in the oil and gas sector, adding that the cut by the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) had impacted the country negatively.

He noted that due to the perennial windfall in the oil sector for a long time, tax sources were ignored, including stamp duty, adding that the tax body has now further embarked on unbundling of its tax administration process.

“We have collected so far N4.2 trillion as at nine months of the year, and out of this N4.2 trillion, N3.3 trillion came from non-oil taxes and the remaining one, which is about N950 billion came from oil taxes,” he said.

“So, if you look at it critically, for the fact that we realised that there’s a problem in the oil and gas sector, the fact that Nigeria government requires these funds to fund the budget, we had to do one or two things differently, making sure we’re able to generate more money for the government.

“It (fall in taxes) has to do with the drop in OPEC quota to Nigeria. It is as low as 1.4 million barrels per day, as against 2.4 BPD that we used to have, and Nigeria is not even able to produce up to that 1.4 million barrels per day. What we currently produce is in the region of 1.2 million barrels and 1.25 million barrels on a monthly basis.

“So, you can imagine the difference of the impact that 1 million barrels a day will have on the revenue of this country and also on the taxes that come from that revenue,” he explained.

TheCable understands that Nigeria’s oil output increased marginally in September to an average of 1.25 million barrels per day from the lowest hit in August — 1.24 million. Nigeria has also been performing below the OPEC quota — from an average of 1.36 million barrels per day in January 2021 to the current 1.25 million.

Speaking further, Nami said that the passage of the Petroleum Industry (PIA) was the right thing to do because the current petroleum profit tax being collected remains very low due to losses declared by oil companies owing to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Those losses are as a result of the policy that gave these oil-producing companies investment allowance as against production allowance. So, whatever you spend, if you like, you spend money on a chartered flight from Abuja to my village, you still pass it to the company’s cost,” Nami said.

“Charter a plane from Nigeria to Egypt or anywhere a meeting is taking place and those become liable to deductions. But with the new petroleum industry act, that ceases to be the case, the reason being that their allowances are now based on the total volume of production that is carried out.

“So if we have this fiscal regime, we’re going to be able to realise two goals. One, oil companies would focus their attention trying to produce which will lead them to making their own money and also translating to revenue and taxes for Nigeria.

“This is opposed to giving them the power or liberty of taking out or deducting all expenses whether it is exclusively or not necessarily in the ordinary course of their business from the profit that they’re supposed to pay taxes from. It is going to be based on the production of oil. This is a fundamental shift.”

The FIRS chairman also added that the agency is deploying new technologies to monitor production volumes.

“We are going to be able to monitor everything, particularly in terms of actually finding the allowable deductions so that going forward, even the Nigerian companies are able to pay taxes expected from them,” he added.

“If by the end of nine months, we have generated N3.3 trillion for non-oil taxes alone, the oil sector used to account for over 55 to 60 per cent of the total taxes we collected in the past.

“So, if everything were to be okay, by today, we should be talking about N7 trillion already because if the non-oil sector were to be operating at a level that you want it to operate, Nigeria would have been better for it.”