CITN Urges States To Emulate Lagos’ Revenue Portal

The Chartered Institute of Taxation of Nigeria (CITN) has commended the move by the Lagos state government on the launch of the Lagos State Revenue Portal (LRP) which is targeted at simplifying the state’s revenue administration process, calling on other states to emulate the move.

President and chairman of council of the institute, Samuel Agbeluyi, in a statement, commended the initiative saying it is critical to engendering confidence in the fiscal management and governance practices of the state government particularly revenues generated internally.

“The launch of the portal Leveraging on technology has the potential of improving tax and other regulatory payments compliance levels as simplifying the process would result in improved revenue collections for the State.

“The situation prevalent in most states is that multiple agencies approach taxpayers and business owners with multiple bills which creates a burden of compliance and increases the cost of doing business. This leads to revenue loss and low collections.

The CITN president, whilst noting that the LRP aggregates all these bills under one platform for ease of payments and administration thereby enhancing the process for the taxpayer and the government, urged other states to follow suit.

“We urge other sub nationals within the federation to take cue from this novel initiative by the Lagos State Government and other states that have embarked on similar schemes. It is important to note that this initiative would not only promote revenue reporting and accounting but fiscal prudence and enhancing the delivery of democratic dividend to the populace.

“This is also a development that will make revenue collection in tandem with global best practice, facilitate ease of doing business, monitoring of revenues, strategic decision making and will promote a professionalised and efficient revenue administration regime.

“We urge the government at all levels to continually evolve measures to engender confidence in its activities to build trust with the populace,” he pointed out.