UN sec-gen names Fowler on tax matters committee

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guteress has named Tunde Fowler, executive chairman, Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS), as a member of the international experts committee on tax matters.

The committee, which has 25 members worldwide, will operate for four years.

The news of Fowler’s appointment was conveyed to the FIRS by Bolaji Akinremi, minister plenipotentiary of Nigeria permanent mission in New York.

Akinremi, in a mail to the FIRS, said: “I have great joy to inform you that the UN secretary-general, H.E Antonio Guteress, has appointed Mr. Babatunde Fowler as one of the 25 members of the prestigious international experts committee on tax matters for a four-year tenure to commence at the inauguration ceremony in Geneva on 1 October 2017.

“In addition to the notification of the appointment by the SG to the UN economic council already placed on the website of the council, individual letters of appointment would be addressed to the appointee and the appointee is to formally accept the nomination through a letter of acceptance addressed to the UNSG through the Nigeria permanent mission, New York.”

Fowler, who is also the chairman of the African Tax Administration Forum, (ATAF) and the Joint Tax Board (JTB), was chairman, Lagos Internal Revenue Service (LIRS).

As the LIRS chairman, the state’s internally generated revenue was said to have risen from an average of N3.6 billion monthly, as at January 2006, to an average of over N23 billion monthly as at June 2015.

FIRS recently announced it generated a sum of N2.11 trillion as revenue from January to July 2017, a sharp increase from the N3.303 trillion it realised in the whole of 2016.