Uyo
March
8, 2016
New
A/Ibom Revenue Bill: Protect Women, Informal Sector Players – NGO
The Akwa Ibom State
House of Assembly has been urged to ensure that the state’s proposed Internal
Revenue Service Bill protects the rights of the most vulnerable taxpayers,
especially women and other players in the informal economy. The call was made
today by Policy Alert, a non-governmental organization involved in economic
justice advocacy, in its memorandum to a public hearing on the Bill organized
by the House Committee on Appropriations and Finance in Uyo.
The memorandum, signed
by the organization’s Head of Programmes, Tijah Bolton-Akpan, noted that “over
the past 16 years a number of operational weaknesses and gaps in the extant legal
framework for revenue administration in the state have continued to undermine
not only the rights of the weakest and poorest tax payers out there but also
the capacity of the state government to generate sustainable levels of internal
revenue.” It listed some of the challenges of revenue governance in the state
to include “weak administrative structures, high-handedness of revenue
collectors, lack of transparency and accountability for collected revenues,
arbitrariness and often unduly high tax burdens on tax payers in the informal
sector”.
Among its other
proposals, the group recommended that the Bill should aim to curb arbitrariness
and reduce excessive tax burdens on the most vulnerable tax payers such as market women and
men, keke drivers and street hawkers by strengthening provisions relating to
local government revenue committees, “outlawing the use of agents and tax
consultants for the collection of taxes”, restricting the definition of revenue
collector in the Bill “to bona fide employees of the IRS to avoid room for
abuse as currently experienced” and protecting taxpayers from excesses of revenue collectors by
limiting the immunity provisions in the bill.
The group, which is
also a member of the Akwa Ibom State Tax Justice Platform, also demanded that
the Bill should contain stronger provisions to ensure transparency and
accountability, such as that all collectable taxes and annual reports “should
be published on the IRS website and other formats within a specified time frame”
and that auditors should not be appointed by the Board but by an external
authority.
#AkwaIbom
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