Ben Ezechime, Enugu
The Executive Chairman, Enugu State Internal Revenue Service (ESIRS), Mr Emmanuel Nnamani, on Friday said the state generated N35. 9 billion in the first seven months of 2024.
Nnamani disclosed this in Enugu, while speaking at a programme to mark his first anniversary in office.
He said the state was able to record the feat owing to the machineries put in place by Gov. Peter Mbah, to boost revenue collection and block leakages .
According to him, the revenue was generated through sales of E-TICKET, collection of Pay-As-You Earn, Land Use Charge Withholding, capital gain, consumption taxes, amongst others.
“We can say that in seven months of 2024, the state has recorded N35.9 billion in Internally Generated Revenue (IGR), compared with N33.9 billion recorded for the whole of 2023.
“This gives us an average collection of N5 billion every month,” he said.
Nnamani explained that when he came on board, he introduced E-ticketing for collection of taxes from the informal sector, capturing markets, transporters, artisans and others.
He described E-ticketing as a disruptive means of informal sector tax collection.
The EISR boss noted that in the informal sector, taxes were hitherto being paid to non-state actors instead of government’s coffers.
“This year, we have recorded over N2.3 billion from the informal sector and it is an achievement.
“We also discovered that in the core area of taxes like Pay As You Earn Tax, Withholding taxes on individuals, only few companies remit these taxes to Enugu government,” he said.
He further said the government had digitalised tax collection by expanding the gateway to six, including Inter Switch, Remita, E-transact, portal, and Monie Point.
“All these are to ease our ways of tax collection and with this little effort, our taxes have begun to rise.
“There were dormant taxes also that we activated such as Capital Gain Tax to boost IGR generation.
“We equally activated purchase tax, which had not been activated for collection. They are majorly on hotels and other support services in the state like sales of beer, cigarettes, cars and others,” he said.
He added that the government expanded collection of Land Use Charge through activation of Geographic Information System.
“We have proof that the number properties within Enugu Metropolis and sub-urban are more than 290,000 and we want to make sure every single property owner pays land use charge,” Nnamani said.
