The Minister of Finance, Budget and National Planning, Mrs. Zainab Ahmed, has said the federal government will optimize the country’s potential in revenue mobilization in 2020.
Ahmed said this in an interview with journalists at the ongoing IMF/World Bank Annual Meetings in Washington DC.
According to her, budgeting is supposed to be based on taxes that a country is able to generate.
“It is an anomaly for us in Nigeria that our budgets have not been focusing on revenue. What we are trying to do in 2020 is to harness the full potential of revenue mobilization. The only increase in taxes in 2020 budget is just VAT,” she explained.
She added: “Everything else is just maximizing the potential of existing tax streams that we have and we hope that we will be able to do this to be able to move our tax to GDP ratio from the current seven to eight per cent of GDP to 15 percent.
“We can only develop in a manner that is sustainable when we are using tax revenues to fund our national and sub-national budgets.
“It is an anomaly that we are depending largely on oil and gas revenue, which is a resource that is finite. It is going to go out of existence before you know it.
“So, we have to develop the domestic tax base. The main focus will be on expanding the tax base ensuring enforcement of the existing laws and then blocking leakages.”
Source: THISDAY
