Nigeria’s Finance Minister, Kemi Adeosun, says of all African nations, Nigeria loses the most from the 50 billion-dollar illicit financial flow out of the continent annually. Mrs. Adeosun made this point while speaking on the issue of taxation and revenue leakages at a tax conference put together by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, OECD, at the UN Headquarters in New York, last week.
The Finance Minister, who featured on the panel that discussed ‘Revenue Leakages: Illicit Financial Flows, said, Nigeria has one of the lowest tax to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) ratio in the world at just six per cent. Mrs. Adeosun explained that the Muhammadu Buhari administration met an empty treasury at its inception, a situation she said that was compounded by the collapse of oil prices in the international market.
She regretted that despite the fact that the nation’s tax laws are weak, many affluent citizens and corporate organizations easily and deliberately evaded paying any tax to the government. To address the challenges, Mrs. Adeosun stated that the federal government constituted a committee to review the extant tax laws and also embarked on updating some of them in order to make them efficient.
The Minister stressed enthusiastically that the nine months of amnesty given to tax defaulters through the Voluntary Asset and Income Declaration Scheme, VAIDS, to regularize their tax information would lapse next month and declared that the government would not extend it.
Mrs. Adeosun warned that Nigerians who had sought tax haven abroad were in for a tough time as the federal government had commenced the sharing of information on Nigerians who owned property and bank accounts overseas. According to her, some foreign countries, including the UK, have already commenced the Automatic Exchange of Tax Information with Nigeria.
She lamented that despite all the goodwill Nigeria was showing to the Western countries, some of them seemed to be deliberately frustrating the federal government’s efforts to get back her stolen funds stashed in their banks. The Minister pointed out that Nigeria would continue to make the necessary sacrifice until the funds are repatriated to the country.
Mrs. Adeosun, who declared categorically that the amount of money Africa lost through illicit financial flows was more than the aid coming into the continent, cited the Thabo Mbeki Committee Report on the matter as evidence to buttress her claim.
