The Borno Government says its targeting N25b Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) in 2025 as against the N19 billion for this year.
Professor Bello Ibrahim, the Chairman Borno State Internal Revenue Service, made this known in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Sunday in Maiduguri.
Ibrahim announced that the agency had already generated more than N18b as of September, adding that by the end of November, the agency would have surpassed its 2024 projections of N19b.
He said that the agency has no plan to introduce any new tax in the state for now.
According to him, we are now focusing more on harnessing all the available means to ensure that no revenue escaped from its collectors.
“We are looking at generating N25b in 2025 God willing. We will intensify efforts to leverage on the little peace we are gaining in the state and expand the scope of our collections.”
The chairman said that the increase in the state’s projected IGR in 2025 was instrumental to an innovative tax drive via automated process which had dramatically changed the fortune of revenue collection in the state.
According to him, the state revenue service has been consistently raising the state revenue collection more than many states in the North-East with the introduction of automated processes in revenue collection.
“If you do comparative analysis, three years; 2021 this agency was able to generate only N10b, in 2022 we managed to generate a little over N17b.
“In 2023 we generated N19.4 or N19.6b, that’s almost N20b, and if you consider Borno State and other states that did not experience this insurgency, you will appreciate the fact that we are not doing badly.
“By next week, we will have a strong delegation that will visit Southern Borno to carry out automated processes in Hawul, Biu, Kwaya-Kusar, Bayo and Shani LGAs; the five local governments will come onboard very soon.
“We believe our IGR will increase tremendously by God’s grace in 2025,” he said.
Ibrahim said that ahead of 2025 revenue target, the service had a week ago signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with a service consultant.
He said the MoU was on Service Level Agreement on collection of revenue from grains and cattle markets through the same automated system.
“We instructed our technical partners to integrate them (consultant) and open an account for them, give them revenue heads, identify the revenue heads that they will collect.
“So this is how we intend to cover the gap that has been identified in our revenue collection in order to meet our projected IGR in 2025,” the chairman said.
He announced that the agency had introduced a new payment gateway in order to improve efficiency and productivity in the state tax collection.
“We have introduced an Informal Sector Collection, called the automated process of tax payments. You don’t need to come to pay your tax physically.
“We are trying to eliminate cash payments. We discovered that the informal sector deals with little; little payments of N1,000, N2,000, particularly in cattle markets in the process of loading and uploading in the garages.
“So, we discovered that along the line, the revenue officers are in the habit of collecting revenue without remitting it all,” Ibrahim said.
