Special Adviser to the Executive Chairman, Lagos Internal Revenue Service (LIRS), Tokunbo Akande, in this interview with BENJAMIN ALADE, speaks on the need for employers to file their taxes as and when due, among other issues affecting tax remittance. The overview of tax filing starts from what are the obligations of the taxpayer. For the campaign that we are running currently, it is not the taxpayer that is filing, what you have are the agents of governments that are filing – agents of government in the sense that we have employers of labour and employers of services and vendors.The benefits are enormous because we are all partners working in the same economy. All we are trying to do is that the law says you should do it. So you should be law-abiding anywhere you are or you find yourself. So the rules that guide us are the constitution and also we have laws. The law says that you must be an agent of the government to do this.The deadline for filing PAYE yearly tax returns with the LIRS is January 31. The penalty or financial penalty is not the main deterrent. The main deterrent is the fact that government agency has a right to prosecute you and conviction. So, why do you want to be designated as a convict for something that has been made easy for you to do? It is not your money and it has nothing to do with you. It is the money for the people that you have employed, and you have deducted on behalf of the government and we are just rendering returns.To expand the tax net, as it were, you know, at the federal level now we have the Presidential Committee on Tax Reforms working on that. Now at the state level, what LIRS and other states have started to do is a kind of multi-channel approach to the expansion of the tax net.
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