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FCT-IRS deploys 165 experts to verify tax payment in MDAs

 The Federal Capital Territory Internal Revenue Service (FCT-IRS) says no fewer than 165 tax consultants and experts have been deployed to verify payments and remittances in Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) of the government.

The FCT-IRS Executive Chairman, Mr Abdullahi Attah, disclosed this in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Abuja on Sunday.

Attah explained that the personnel currently in the field were tasked to carry out an audit of taxpayers in the MDAs  to identify taxes deducted and not remitted to the service.

He said the consultants were engaged to handle the audit from 2015 to 2020, while the FCT-IRS staff would concentrate on 2021.

“We have 165 tax experts from the different organisations in the field that are doing the verification. It has already commenced.

‘I am appealing to various MDAs to cooperate with them. What we are trying to do is just to verify how much have you paid from your records, the consultants will go through and check for us.

“While we concentrate on the current one, these agencies we engaged would help us to do the arrears from 2015 to 2020 and they are right now in the field.

“We expect to see significant increase in our performance at the end of the year because we know some agencies collected tax and they did not remit to us. That is what we are following up and there is no exception. All MDAs and private organisations will be visited.

“The engagement of the consultants is necessary because we do not have enough staff to go through over 900 MDAs and private organisations in FCT.

“There is indication already of recovering money from the exercise and we hope to harvest quite a lot of revenues from this effort,” he explained. (NAN)