Finance Bill: Tax expert advocates public sensitisation

Mr Tion Williams, a taxation expert, has called for sensitisation of citizens on the recently signed 2019 Finance Bill by President Muhammadu Buhari.

Williams, a Managing Partner of T.A Williams firms, made the appeal at a One Day Workshop on the Nigeria Finance Bill ‘Tax Implications’ in Abuja on Wednesday.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) recalls that Buhari signed the 2019 Finance Bill into law in January.

He explained that the new bill had a lot of benefits to businesses especially Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises but people were not aware as more emphases were given to Value Added Tax (VAT) by the media.

He said the new tax bill encourage small businesses to grow which was the essence of establishing it, to motivate small scale businesses with less than N25 million turnover to grow to a certain level before they would be taxed.

According to him, there must be serious tax education by the government on what the citizens stand to gain from the bill.

“When the bill came on board, most of the media especially some newspapers captioned it that VAT has been raised from five per cent to 7.5 per cent, the wole attention was on VAT even the National Assembly.

“VAT is a consumption tax, it is a service tax, it comes directly on turnover but it is unfortunate that other aspects of the bill are downplayed like the issue of Company Income Tax (CIT), Stamp Duty, Petroleum Profit Tax, among others,” he stated.

Williams explained that in the finance bill, companies had been segmented into three categories which were small, medium and large.

According to him, the small category is a company with a turnover of less than N25 million and such has been exempted from payment of VAT and CIT.

He said a company with N25 million to N100 million turnover was expected to pay corporate tax or CIT which had been reduced from 30 per cent to 20 per cent.

He disclosed that the stamp duty as contained in the new bill had bank charges reduced.

The expert who emphasised on the need for awareness creation on the bill said Nigerians were not properly informed on what the bill was all about.

Meanwhile, Williams had cautioned business owners who were mainly participants of the workshop not to patronise quack auditors and Tax consultants in the country. (NAN)