The Federal Government says it has commenced the training of 7,500 graduates set to be deployed to rural communities for enforcement of tax laws. The Minister of Finance, Kemi Adeosun who made this disclosure after visiting the first batch of about 27 graduates selected from the N-Power social intervention scheme for the exercise stated that the aim of the move was to increase the nation's Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) while reducing over dependence on oil revenue.
The Minister lamented that so many taxable Nigerians were not fulfilling their obligation, stressing that the development was affecting governance. “When you look at our population and the population of taxable Nigerians and the number of people and institutions paying tax out of the taxable population, you would see that we have so much to do to get more people to pay tax. And that is what we are doing through the 7,500 tax advocates.
They will go into the hinterland and rural communities including churches, mosques and schools to sensitize Nigerians to pay tax" she added
“We need people to know that paying tax is a law and not paying is breaking the law. It is from the tax funds that government provides social services.
“We need to educate people on this and these people are being trained to do just that.
“It is a five-day course and we have graduates from different fields like law, accounting, finance, mathematics and other related fields.
The Minister further disclosed that “this training facility is under the Office of the Account General of the Federation and it can take 200 persons at a time. But this is the pilot scheme and we have just 27 persons here. Now that we have seen that everything is okay, we’ll go full swing of 200 till we cover the 7,500 persons".
