World Bank’s country director for Nigeria, Ndiamé Diop, has said the federal government’s twin policies of currency float and fuel subsidy removal have resulted in higher revenue generation.
Diop, therefore, projected the nation’s revenue to rise from 7.6 per cent to 10.5 per cent of GDP.
Meanwhile, the United Nations’ chief economist, Hanan Morsy, has criticised Nigeria’s tax system, saying it complicates compliance.
They made these comments at the 30th Nigerian Economic Summit in Abuja on Tuesday.
Morsy said, “When the fiscal reforms are done, we need to focus not just on the numbers that we need to reach to increase revenues, but how we go about doing them. There can sometimes be a tendency to increase the tax rate on, you know, in the existing structure, and some of these taxes fall on the few that are already paying rather than expanding and broadening the tax net and the tax rates. So, how these three forms are done really matters.
“Then the other issue that has not worked is having rather complex tax systems. This complicates compliance,” she stated in the plenary session on ‘Fiscal Reforms for a More Secure Future’.
She urged the government to pay more attention to providing tax incentives to encourage compliance, incentives that are not tied to performance, she stated.
Morsy told the government that, to rationalise taxes, it should make them more efficient and prevent them from disincentivising businesses from investing.
On his part, minister of finance and coordinating minister of the Economy Wale Edun said the federal government had disbursed N75 billion to micro, small, and medium enterprises under the current administration.
The finance minister also claimed that four million households had been supported under the government’s social investment programme, spearheaded by direct cash transfers.
He said the programme had been scaled up to 20 million households, which the scheme would support.
“Another N75 billion is being disbursed in lots of N1m each at 9% interest per annum to help them cope with the cost of living spike and the cost of the production and operations,” Edun said yesterday at a plenary session on the sidelines of the 30th Nigeria Economic Summit.
“That is how the President is spending the money being yielded.”
Edun claimed that the Bola Tinubu administration’s policy interventions have doubled revenue generation, much of which is being used to fund the students’ loan scheme, consumer credit scheme, and MSMEs funding.
Mr Edun also claimed that 269,000 students are being processed to benefit from the government’s student loan.
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