FG: VAIDS Collects Data of Five Million Nigerians

The Value Assets and Income Declaration Scheme (VAIDS), has collected personal data of over five million corporate organisations and individuals in the country.

This was disclosed in a statement issued by the VAIDS office at the Federal Ministry of Finance. According to the statement, data collected will be subjected to further analysis to ensure that all unpaid taxes are tracked and collected. The VAIDS office also disclosed that the second phase of its data mining initiative, which starts this month, is aimed at obtaining data from all other government revenue-generating agencies such as the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS), Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN), Federal Housing Authority (FHA), Petroleum Technology Development Fund (PTDF) and Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC). Data gathered from these agencies, explained the VAIDS office, would be used to determine the companies that have not remitted taxes based on income earned, those that have underdeclared and government agencies or corporate organisations, which have collected taxes on behalf of the government but have failed to remit such.

Last month, the data collection efforts of the VAIDS office received further boost when the governments of Lagos, Osun and Kaduna states as well as the Federal Capital Territory adminsitration volunteered to provide all transaction data required to identify tax defaulters at the expiration of the first phase of the VAIDS tax amnesty programme on 31 March 2018.

States which provide required information are expected to experience steep jump in the Internally Generated Revenue (IGR), as analyses of data by the VAIDS office will lead to considerable recovery of lost revenues and provide a rich data capture of eligible taxpayers.

Earlier, the VAIDS office had obtained data on all contracts and transactions above N50 million from the Nigerian Customs Service, Assets Management Corporation of Nigeria (AMCON) and Nigeria Export-Import Bank (NEXIM) among other sources. Data collected are being matched with those that will be provided by the FIRS, Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) and Government Integrated Financial and Management Information System (GIFMIS) to identify tax-defaulting companies.