Nigeria Loses $2.9billion Annually To Tax Incentives – Action Aid

Policy Advocacy and Campaigns Manager of Action Aid, Tunde Aremu, said Nigeria lost 2.9 billion dollars yearly to tax incentives to multinational companies operating in the country.

Aremu disclosed this when he visited a member of the House of Representatives, Odeneye Kehinde (APC-Ogun) on Thursday, March 3, in Abuja.

He said that there was need for the National Assembly to review the laws that granted incentives to the multinational companies, adding that the legislature should also probe the processes of granting the tax incentives.

“How are these incentives negotiated? Our suspicion is that the processes of negotiating these incentives are not open.

“The companies go under the rugs to negotiate these incentives

“The Nigerian parliament should start querying the processes and demand that they should be open and transparent and that the representatives of the people should be informed when these incentives are being negotiated,’’ he said.

Aremu said that although that tax avoidances were legal, “they are actually legal means of stealing money’’.

He described e-trading, over invoicing, mispricing and price shifting as some of the technical terms adopted by the companies to encourage illicit financial flow from the country.

“The bulk of the money leaving Africa that we are losing contrary to impression, is not due to corruption, crime, drug trade or trade in human trafficking or other crimes

“Over 75 per cent of the money leaving Africa illicitly is actually through tax avoidance practices which unfortunately is not regarded as illegal,’’ he stated.

He also urged the legislature to demand for the audit of the incentives, saying that such measure would check abuses of the incentives.