Kemi Adeosun, minister of Finance, has said that Nigeria will realise over  $1billion from the recent executive order signed by Yemi Osinbajo, acting President. Osinbajo had last Thursday, signed an executive order to give room for Nigerians to regularise their taxes. Adeosun, who spoke on a Channels Television programme, Sunrise Daily, said after 15 months of work, it was discovered that there was massive tax evasion in the country. “I have not set a specific target because it is very difficult, anything over a billion dollars would be great but let me just give you some context. Some countries have raised between $7 billion to $15 billion, it really just depends on how much compliance we get from Nigerians, and it is not just high net worth Nigerians incidentally that are our target but companies,” said the minister.
Continuing, she said, “We found out that a lot of companies are evading taxes, paying minimum tax and shifting profits to other jurisdiction to make sure Nigeria gets a small percentage of the money generated in Nigeria. Even at the lower level we are finding massive tax evasion. We have only 14 million tax payers in Nigeria and the majority of them are PAYE, that is people who have their tax deducted at source.”
Adeosun explained that apart from stolen funds, Nigeria was facing a problem of untaxed money. “We have done quite an amount of work over 15 months looking at tax compliance in Nigeria. Our tax to GDP ratio is six percent, one of the lowest in the world. So we did a study, why are Nigerians not paying tax and why are tax revenue so low. What we found is a massive tax evasion on a major scale. A lot of people are registered, many of those that are registered are not paying the right taxes. We now have the data and we actually engaged a team of experts to go through the data and what we found is that in many cases, peoples lifestyle do not correlate with their tax returns. So there was massive tax invasion,” she said.