COVID-19: Kano State Govt. To Reduce Tax — IRS Boss

• Tax

Alhaji Abdulrazak Datti-Salihi, the Executive Chairman of Kano State Internal Revenue Service says it has concluded plans to slash personal income tax as relief following second wave of COVID-19 pandemic.

Datti-Salihi disclosed this in an interview with News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Abuja on Thursday.

He explained that the tax relief package was to ease the hardship occasioned by COVID-19 and encourage taxpayers to come forward to pay their taxes.

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According to him, the pandemic has affected most businesses, hence the need to provide such relief for taxpayers in the state.

“In Kano state, with the approval of the Executive Governor, we are looking at what we called COVID-19 palliatives for our taxpayers.

“We now have some tax relief package for our taxpayers, we are looking at reducing the personal income tax by certain percentage to motivate our taxpayers to pay their taxes.

“We are looking for other ways to expand the tax net so that more people will be captured with a view to generating more revenue for the state,’’ he said.

The chairman noted that plans had been concluded to introduce technology to drive their goal of expanding the tax net.

He said with the nature of the state, reducing taxes as well as capture more people would help the service to generate more revenue.

“Kano is a commercial nerve centre, if you look at the businesses in the state, about 60 per cent of them are informal in nature and most of these businesses are not captured in our tax net because of difficulty in coordinating them.

“We are working seriously to bring more people and companies to the tax net and reduce the taxes being paid by individuals and companies as COVID-19 relief for certain period of time.

“And having additional people in our tax net will help to augment the shortfall arising from the slashing of taxes and hence meeting the revenue target,’’ he explained.