Firs, Nnpc Meet Over Unremitted Taxes

BEVERLY HILLS, April 13, (THEWILL) – Authorities of the Federal Inland Revenue Services (FIRS) and Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) have decided to resolve the lingering issues bothering on huge unpaid taxes into the Federal Government’s accounts.

According to Babatunde Fowler, FIRS Chairman, other defaulting companies being engaged by FIRS over outstanding tax issues include four airlines, oil and gas firms, and shipping companies, among others.

Fowler revealed that the discussion with Federal Ministry of Finance had reached advanced stage to ensure deduction from source of various taxes from major oil marketers involved in the oil subsidy and all the ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) on contracts to be awarded.

Fowler said this at the investigative public hearing on the ‘Accounting procedure of FIRS’, by the Adhoc Committee chaired by Michael Enyong.

He said that the Service was funded by the 4 percent cost of collection on all non-oil taxes collected by it as appropriated by the National Assembly to meet its personnel, recurrent, capital and other expenditure.

According to Fowler, the FIRS in collaboration with two operational account holding commercial banks, deployed an electronic end-to-end payment system which enables the function to make instant payment directly to the beneficiaries account without submitting manual or soft copies of mandate to banks.

“These systems are called FastPay and GAPS for Stanbic IBTC and GTBank respectively. Subsequently, another end-to-end payment platform for capital transactions on CBN account was also introduced via REMITA platform provided by vendor named System Specs,” according to reports.

“Implementation of SAP-FICO, an integrated enterprise Resources planning application which combines procurement and finance processes and adopted to interface with the SAR-HR module. This system when fully implemented is envisaged to provide the ultimate solution for both budgeting, general ledger accounting, cash book and bank reconciliation and a seamless real time financial reports generation and analysis for management information for internal decision making and statutory compliance,” Fowler informed the Committee.”

Story by David Oputah