Kaduna State Revenue Service (KADIRS) has promised to grow the state’s Internally Generated Revenue to over 80% of its annual budget and also increase the IGR to N100 billion by the year 2024.
Executive Chairman of the Service, Dr. Zaid Abubakar stated this during the 2020 award presentation night which held at the weekend to recognise taxpayers who have been consistent in paying their taxes.
The award night also recognised other government agencies whose contributions helped the service to exceed its revenue target of N50 billion last year.
According to Dr Abubakar, KADIRS has come up with a medium and long-term collection plans in order to boost the IGR of Kaduna state.
‘’For the medium-term revenue collection plan, we expect that by 2024 Kaduna will be able to collect more than N100bn and by 2030 we should be able to collect more than N200bn.
‘’With that we can, to a certain extent say, whether FAAC holds or not, at least 70-80% of our budgetary requirements will be met through IGR,’’ Dr Abubakar promised.
The Executive Chairman said that the essence of the ‘’ award night is to engender inter-agency collaboration and also to motivate our teeming taxpayers to continue to pay their taxes to the state government.’’
Abubakar noted that despite the pandemic and significant changes and scaling down the budget by N50 billion, the state did not only meet its budget but exceeded it.
‘’Under the transformative leadership of His Excellency, Governor Nasir El-Rufai, the state’s tax collection has grown from N12bn in 2015 to N44.9bn in 2019 and over N50bn in 2020, thus becoming one of the states with the highest IGR across the federation,’’ he said.
Dr Abubakar attributed this success to the political support that KADIRS enjoys from the governor and the State Executive Council, the unwavering commitment of staff of the agency, taxpayers’ compliance and support, as well as the invaluable collaborative efforts of revenue collecting MDAs.
Zainab Isah, who sells ‘waina’, a local snack in Kaduna metropolis, was one of the recipients of the award.
She expressed delight for the recognition as one of the citizens that pay their taxes, adding that the award will motivate her ‘’to keep paying taxes to the state government.’’
“I pay tax because I have trust in this government, knowing that it will always do what it says it will do with taxpayers’ money for the good of the people. It is with these taxes that they are providing social services that we are all benefiting from. I call on people to pay their taxes because government means well,’’ she added.
