Agaju Madugba, Katsina
The Katsina State Board of Internal Revenue said it would begin the prosecution of tax defaulters as from March 2020 as part of measures to encourage payment of tax by citizens and boost revenue generation for the state.
Chairman of the Board, Aminu Abdulmumini, at a press briefing at the weekend, lamented that government loses an estimated N100 million annually in tax default from the informal sector.
Abdulmumini said despite the loss, about N8.1 billion was generated between January and September 2019.
He said the amount generated in the first eight months of the 2019 was about 10 per cent in excess of the N6 billion target set for the year.
“Nobody wants to pay tax, even the civil servants. People do not give the correct record of their business sales for true assessment of taxes to be paid. The taxable income earners from the informal sector do not keep records of their transactions.
“We are compiling a list of people who default in tax payment as we lose N100 million annually from the informal sector from businesses that don’t pay their taxes.
“We engaged a consultant to conduct enumeration, and we have served demand notice to all the defaulting tax payers and only few of them have responded.
“We will write to the state executive council to get approval to start prosecuting them from March 2020,” said Abdulmumini.
He said Katsina is an agrarian state and explained that the law exempts income earners below N300,000annually from paying tax. Abdulmumini said the majority of the people, even civil servants, in the Katsina earn below N300,000.