FIRS moves to enhance tax collection, voluntary compliance
The Federal Inland Revenue Service on Thursday in Abuja began the pilot scheme of its Integrated Tax Administration System Project.
The move, according to the acting Executive Chairman, FIRS, Alhaji Kabir Mashi, is part of efforts aimed at optimising tax collection and improving the level of voluntary compliance among tax payers.
The ITAS go-live project is a technology deployed administrative tax system, which is borne out of the FIRS modernisation programme.
This, Mashi said, was conceived to assist the Service in discharging its statutory duty of assessing, collecting and accounting for taxes collected.
He said the journey of modernisation had begun and that automation of tax administration constituted a larger part of the transformation initiative of the FIRS.
Mashi said, “The objective of the implementation is, among others, to make the compliance process easier for tax payers and ensure transparent and efficient tax system that optimises tax collection and voluntary compliance.
“You may recall that I made a nationwide broadcast to employees of the FIRS on the functionalities that the ITAS is going to deploy right from go-live and the benefit it will have on both our esteemed taxpayers and tax officers.
“I am happy that we are witnessing the project going live today at the first pilot. As we stabilise on this pilot in the next few weeks, the rollout to the next pilots will follow before a big bang to other sites in 2014.”
[Punch]