Oti who spoke with www.calitown.com in his office, explained that it has become necessary to address this issue “with the hope that more people will be properly educated”. In his words, “the law empowers the IRS to do what we call a back duty. A back duty simply means going back to those years that you did not pay tax and then we ask you to pay. Now for a long time in the state, the tax administration system was slow at getting to people to enforce the tax law. We are taking the back taxes now and asking those who have owed the state all this while, to pay up and that is where the problem is”. He insisted that those who are claiming that government is over taxing, fall into this category and are making claims that are very far from the truth. “Besides that, there is a provision in the law which says that if you feel that the tax you have been asked to pay is too high, you should raise an objection. Not many people have done that”, Oti adds.
On the state’s GDP (Gross Domestic Product), the S.A to the governor revealed that it is in the region of 1.2 trillion, based on the report released by the National Planning Commission. Based on these figure, he believes CRS has the capacity to internally generate and meet her monthly revenue target of N3 billion, “provided we ensure that all loopholes are blocked. If we cannot block all the loopholes, let us block up to 95% and that will be good for us”, he concluded.
