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The Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) and the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) have acknowledged the importance of tax, arguing that it should be made a pivot of national development.
The heads of TETFund and FIRS made the disclosure recently in Lagos at the 2022 joint interactive forum held to appraise the performance in the collection of the Education Development Tax (EDT) by FIRS.
In his remarks at the event, the Executive Secretary of TETFund, Mr. Sunny Echono, observed that the need to boost the EDT cannot be overemphasized.
He added: “Tax collection is vital to the growth of the education sector and in the light of this; we have to appreciate the support and contributions of the FIRS. Eligible tax payers must be drawn into the tax pool. In 2021, what we got was N189 billion, which was lower than the over N200 billion that we got in 2020 and we had to scale down our activities.
“We are, however, glad that the inflow this year has been very impressive, as at September this year, we have gotten N309 billion, which was even higher than the N305 billion targets for the whole year. We are grateful to President Muhammadu Buhari for raising the EDT from 2 percent to 2.5 percent.
“We hope that our target of N500 billion by 2025 would be met and that the President would help raise the EDT to 3 percent before leaving office. We will continually justify the confidence reposed in us by making judicious use of the funds.”
The TETFund boss said apart from the provision of physical facilities in tertiary institutions across the country, no fewer than 37,000 academic staff have been trained at postgraduate level within and outside Nigeria on the bill of the fund.
The Executive Chairman of FIRS, Mohammed Nami, stressed that the agency was making significant progress in revenue collection.
Nami, who was represented by Abubakar Mohammed, said FIRS is a major contributor to the revenue purse of the Federal Government in the last few years.
“We are deploying technology in the collection of tax. The Finance Act 2020 as amended has helped us in generating more funds and we are constantly looking at areas we can improve on. In 2021, the total collection we made was N6. 4 trillion, but by September this year, we have collected N7.5 trillion,” he noted.
Representatives of heads of tertiary institutions and beneficiaries of the various scholarship programmes of TETFund gave testimonies of how the fund has helped them.
