Kaduna State generated N9.6b IGR from January to June – official

The Kaduna State Internal Revenue Service (KDIRS) said it generated N9.6 billion Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) between January and June.

Muktar Ahmed, the Executive Chairman of KDIRS, told our reporter on Thursday in Kaduna that workers constituted the largest contributors followed by Kaduna State Geographic Information Service.

Ahmed identified other sources to include hospital bills and school fees.

He said that the state had three to four million potential tax payers, but expressed regret that only about 400,000 were in the KDIRS revenue net.

Ahmed said that efforts were being made to bring all eligible tax payers into the tax net to boost the state revenue generation and provide better services to the people.

He, however, acknowledged that the N9.6 billion IGR was significantly short of the N27 billion expected to have been generated in the first half of the year to meet the N54 billion targeted this year.

“We were actually hoping to generate about N11 billion in the sale of government properties which would have boosted our revenue to N22 billion in the first six months.

“But the process is ongoing and we are hoping that it will soon pull through.

“Another revenue line that we have not fully tapped is the land use charge that every real property owner in the state will pay.

“The state executive council has approved the land use charge rates for 2017 which is N10, 000 for people with real properties in Government Reserved Areas (GRAs) and N1000 for those in suburb areas.

“I am optimistic that by the time we start collecting the land use charges, our revenue generation will significantly improve”, he said.

The chairman said that local government areas remained major challenge in revenue collection for KDIRS as their officials were still collecting cash in local government areas.

“In the process, tax payers are short-changed. We will not allow that to continue. We have sent out intelligence to fish out those involved.

“Already, seven officials including VIO officials in our motor vehicle registration offices have been arrested and charged to court for forgery of vehicle documents and criminal conspiracy.

“I assure you, we will soon clean KDIRS of bad eggs and block all leakages so that the government will get its due revenue,” he said.

Ahmed thanked tax payers in the state for the cooperation so far and appeal for more support to move the state forward.