Adamu Lawan: Borno’s IGR Target Now N10bn
What is the internally generation revenue of Borno State like at present? Our budget for 2020 is for us to generate N4.6 billion, that is from January 2020 to December 2020. So far, we have been able to generate close to N4 billion in five months - January to May. Now, our target has changed from N4.6 billion to N10 billion for year 2020 and we have our reasons. One of the things we did or we are still doing to make sure we raise our IGR is to firstly ensure all the leakages are blocked. You cannot block all for sure, you know our people, but at least we have been able to reduce it considerably. We have blocked most of these leakages. We all know that all these revenue officers (collectors) have like two receipts. They will go and collect revenue on behalf of government and they have their personal receipt too which they will issue about four times before they issue one government receipt. They do collect higher than what they bring to government. The first thing we did was the introduction of Treasury Single Account (TSA) for revenue. For now, all MDAs that are revenue generating would close all their existing revenue accounts and be paying directly to that treasury single account through remita. Now, we do not allow cash payments in those MDAs. If someone wants to pay his tax or levy or whatever you would be asked to go to a bank because this platform goes through all the banks. You can go to the platform of your choice and pay, then a receipt will be generated, the normal remita receipt. Once you pay, the entire revenue network would be able to see who paid, for what purpose and how much had been paid. With that, we were able to boost our IGR collections in the last one year or so. That is one aspect.
The second aspect is that we contacted a forensic audit firm to come and audit all our revenue generating agencies, especially the federal government agencies. You know the federal government’s workers that are living in Borno ought to pay their PAYE to Borno State Government. For the past years, like ten years, these federal agencies were not remitting to Borno State Government the PAYE of their workers. With that, we now engaged the services of forensic auditors to audit those federal agencies and at the end of the day, we were able to come out with a figure which is N8.2 billion. They should have remitted N8.2 billion to Borno State, which they have not done. We do not have problem with the federal agencies, we just have to write the Ministry of Finance where they get their money. This did not only happen in Borno State but in most states.
The federal government says they cannot pay the entire sum to the states and they paid us 25 per cent of the money owed, which is about N1.8 billion, that is also part of the revenue and that was what actually boosted our revenue collection this year. That is why we are even close to achieving this year’s target of N4.6 billion. And we are expecting that before the end of the year, the remaining 75 per cent or at least 50 per cent of the PAYE from the federal government would be paid to us, which will also increase our revenue generation. With our TSA and payment of revenue through the bank, I believe we can surpass the N10 billion we target before the end of the year. It is just a conservative figure, the 75 per cent is over N6 billion alone.
Has the presence of NGOs in the state contributed to the growth in your IGR?
Yes, it has. Right now, we are trying to see what the NGOs will be paying. We had a meeting with them. We have some consultants who are actually auditing them; their workers, how much they are getting and their PAYE too should come to us. We have not been able to finish, but once we finish, we will tell them what they should be paying or ought to pay. It will definitely boost our IGR.
If you are able to generate N10 billion where would that take you to in the ranking of states?
Right now, we are number 31 or 32, but by the time we hit the N10 billion or more, we will go up to 16 or 17 position, because we have another source, we have not talked about, which is the BUDGIT - Borno Geographical Information Service Agency. It is one of the cash cows. It is going to be a huge revenue generating agency because right now they have upgraded from the manual way of doing things to the automated system. Even the ground rent is massive. Last week, they wrote to the members of the state executive council to pay theirs, claiming that charity should begin at home. Even those in the House of Assembly and everyone in government should come and pay their ground rent so that everyone else would follow suit. They are going to enforce it immediately. Ground rent alone would give us between N5 billion and N6 billion. Once it is passed into law, the revenue of the state will improve massively. The reason we are still foot-dragging and do not want to work at collecting the taxes, levies and fines is that we want to collect a new rate rather than the old rate and we are waiting for a new law to be passed by the Assembly.
But with the COVID-19, one of the ways to give relief to the people is to apply tax relief because of the lockdown. After we have the law, we are going to say this is the tax relief we are extending to the people for the next one or two years. We will let people know that this is the new tax regime and this is what we are extending to the people. We know with COVID-19, businesses have crashed and we cannot overburden our people by enforcing new task regime.
By 2021, we are going to boost our IGR. I do not just want to quote a figure for now, but we want to see how this year will pan out. We are going to see how much we can generate at the end of the year. Our projection for next year would be twice what we generate this year, even if not more.