Barrister Francis Danladi Kozah, Board Secretary/Legal Adviser, Kaduna State internal Revenue Service,in this interview with Emmanuel Ado, speaks on the achievements of the Service and why it resorts to sealing up businesses over PAYE and the expectations of the service in 2020.
Question: Congratulations to the entire staff and management of the Kaduna State Internal Revenue Service(KADIRS) for unprecedented feat the service achieved in 2019 ….taking the service from a paltry 12billion yearly to 44billion is no mean feat…
Answer: ..We are grateful to be of service to the good people of Kaduna State and we are assuring them that we will be more dedicated to our work in the year 2020.
Question: If I understand your statement…does that mean a more aggressive tax drive? Because 44b is history now.
Answer: Like you know, everybody wants to grow to improve on whatever he has achieved and for us in KADIRS, we are looking forward to more achievements. We are looking to build on the 44 billion we collected last year. For us that is just a foundation,which will help us achieve our target for 2020. We do look forward to better achievements, which is possible with more dedication to service.
Q. So the companies and every taxable adult should expect more rigorous compliance enforcement. Can you also let us into the secret of your achievement….how did you achieve this unprecedented feat?
Answer:What we simply did was to dust our books and luckily we have operated the Kaduna State Tax (Codification and consolidation) Law, 2016 for over four years now. we have come to appreciate and understand the law better. We exploited the areas that were hitherto unexploited. We capitalized on it and exploited the situation to the advantage of the state which is in dire need of money to fund projects. That is part of the secret. We studied the law, we understood the law better. And since taxation is purely legal, we were better positioned to enforce the law in 2019 following the experiences of the last four years.
Question: You talked about the law and the fact that the service went through reforms and of course the prohibition of cash collection was that a game changer?
Answer: The provisions of that law practically positioned us to do better. When you have done something for four years,there is that tendency that you will appreciate it much more better to achieve results.Secondly, the staff that we hired have proved invaluable ..they have good understanding of our mandate through several orientation programmes that they went through. The kudos goes to the staff who have implemented the law and the law itself; if the law wasn’t there we wouldn’t have been able to do it.
