By Our Correspondent
Nasarawa State Government has begun the implementation of its Harmonisation and Administration of Revenue law to block revenue leakages.
The Harmonisation and Administration of Revenue Bill was passed by the state assembly and became a law on Dec. 31, 2020 after Gov. Abdullahi Sule accented to it.
It provides for the harmonisation and collection of all revenues accruing to the state and local government areas as well as the establishment of relevant administrative structures.
Engineer Sule, while addressing a stakeholders’ summit on the implementation of the law on Thursday in Lafia, said it was meant to ensure transparency in the system and boost the revenue base of the state.
He stated that the government needed the resources for the overall development of the state, hence the need to sanitise the revenue generation system.
According to Engineer Sule, Nasarawa has the potential to sustain itself without the allocation from the federation account but that internally generated revenue leakages have made that impossible.
The governor warned that the state government would not tolerate anyone found violating the law.
“I am appealing to all to obey this law for the betterment of state,” Sule said.
Meanwhile, the chairman of the State Internal Revenue Board, Ahmed Muhammad, said the essence of the law was to curtail the unorganised manner in which Ministries, Department and Agencies as well local government areas interacted with tax payers without recourse to the revenue board.
Muhammad said: “The multiplicity in the collection of receipts necessitated the need to harmonise these processes for proper monitoring and coordination between MDAs, local government areas and the state revenue board.”
He added that law centralises the process of serving demand notices, generation and collection of revenue under one pool, noting that the law empowers the board with the sole responsibility of revenue collection in the state to the exclusion of MDAs and local councils.
