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Tax: Public ignorance our major challenge – KWIRS

The Kwara State Internal Revenue Service (KWIRS) has said that public ignorance of tax collection remains a major challenge to its operations.

The Director of Legal Services and Enforcement of the agency, Barr. Lateef Okandeji made the disclosure during an interview with Pilot Business on Tuesday.

He said, ” All what we do here is being guided by the law and the service is endowed with rebounds human resources in the legal directorate as it is in other departments.

“Today we have about 11 lawyers in the directorate to assist in ensuring that the level of public compliance and enforcement with the tax rules and regulations is high for the agency,” he further said.

Okandeji stressed that there are processes of enforcement and the legal directorate is the bus stop after the revenue collection directorate have exhausted its powers and the tax payers have failed to comply.

He said, ” What we do at this stage in accordance with the law is to serve the defaulter a statutory notice stating our intention before approaching the revenue court. Our advantage here is that all cases will be handled within 30 days once it is in the court, therefore we must be fully prepared before going there.

” Since January till date there is no month that we don’t record about 15 cases averagely. But the beauty of it is that most of the cases don’t get to conclusion because as soon as the court processes are served to the tax payers they rush here to negotiate with us on how to pay the money instrumentally.

According to him, the number of cases handled so far since the establishment of the agency can’t be less than 120.

The Director noted that the major difficulties in tax collection has to do with the ignorance of the people on tax payment

He called on the public to support the government by paying their tax, saying  the gesture can be transform into provision of social amenities and infrastructure.

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