Nigeria’s tax receipts in 2021 rose by 29.4% to N6.41tn ($15.5 billion), the head of Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS), Muhammad Nami, said on Thursday.
Nami said the final number had come in slightly higher than the initial forecast of N6.40tn, thanks to digitization which facilitated collections in 2021. Value-added taxes contributed the most followed by corporate taxes, he said. “The deployment of the new automated tax administration system in June 2021 was a game[1]changer,” Nami said in a report.
Tax receipts dropped to N4.95tn in 2020 after a COVID-19 induced lockdown impacted businesses and a recession that year hurt the economy.
The FIRS collected N5.27tn in 2019, it said. The World Bank said last year that Nigeria needed to boost non[1]oil taxes to at least 12.75% of gross domestic product to boost growth. It said tax collection sits at around 4.5% of GDP, one of the lowest rates in the world. The FIRS said the non-oil sector contributed 69% to total taxes in 2021, as much as in 2020 and up from 60% in 2019. ($1 = 414.90 naira .