IGR: Plateau rakes N6.6b as revenue in nine months

The Plateau State Government on Tuesday said it generated N6.6 billion internal revenue from January to September in spite of the economic recession.
Dashe Arlat, the Acting Chairman of the Plateau State Internal Revenue Service, disclosed this in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria in Jos.
Arlat, who described the feat as “very satisfactory” and “encouraging”, commended the efforts of his staff and the MDAs, whose collection during the period had tremendously improved.
The Chairman expressed happiness over the monthly collections which represented a sharp deviation from last year, having netted between N700 million and N800 million in spite of the biting economic recession.
Arlat said: “By keeping this tempo in nine months, we have succeeded in collecting what was realised in the whole of last year (2015) in the sum of N6.93 billion.
“We are pretty sure that by God’s grace before December ending, we should be clocking N9 billion as revenue collection for the year 2016.”
Giving further analysis of the collection within the period, Arlat said that PSIRS garnered N5.05 billion while Ministries, Departments and Agencies realised N1.55 billion.
According to him, the lowest revenue of N597. 9 million was recorded in February while the highest of N855.5 million was recorded in March.
Arlat disclosed that very soon a service provider, engaged by the state government, would commence enumeration of all taxable adults through bio-metric capturing system.
He explained that the target was the informal sector under various ministries such as commerce, transport, tourism, agriculture, health and education aimed at harmonising the revenue collection and erasing double or multiple taxation in the state.
He also said: “By the time the service provider commences work around the state, we shall do away with multiple or double taxation, which have usually been the complaints of a sizeable number of tax payers.”
The chairman called for understanding and cooperation from all taxable adults and corporate bodies ensuring prompt payment of their tax to avoid the wrath of the law.
He said that for some months now, defaulters were being tried at the special court assigned to PSIRS by the government to ensure that what was due to the government was collected.