The Federal Capital Territory Administration (FCTA) has said it hopes to realise N3billion revenue from outdoor advertising by the first half of 2020.
Director, FCT Department of Outdoor Advertisement and Signage, DOAS, Dr. Babagana Adam said the department has the capacity to generate more than the N500million realised in 2019 but have been limited by unlawful agents bleeding the system.
While addressing journalists over the weekend, he stated that the agency is working on advanced IT driven ways of revenue collection in order to block leakages and prevent further evasion of advertisement taxes.
“We generated N500million in 2019, but the plan is to hit the billion naira mark by May 2020. At the rate we are going, we will exceed that and probably we will be talking about N3billion revenue by May 2020.”
He added that the department is currently working out payment plans that will discourage agents from accumulating debts.
“The problem is that the FCT has been in limbo for so long and practitioners were allowed to owe for too long unlike places like Lagos where you dare not owe for one month. So what we intend to do is to introduce quarterly payment plan so agents and practitioners will not accumulate debts.”
The director further revealed that the agency is working tirelessly to recover the N1.9billion outstanding debt being owed by 86 practitioners who ran advertisement on the 707 billboards across the city.
He added that the agency may soon be delisting 45 practitioners that have failed to reconcile their debt profile with DOAS.
On ways of resolving issues of double taxation on businesses, the DOAS boss said, “Going forward, what we intend to do is, if any of the area council collects advert revenue directly from agents and practitioners, we will calculate all the monies they have collected through the back door then deduct that amount from the allocation due to them.
That way, the area councils will realise that there is no point using their own resources to collect revenues themselves when they can just allow DOAS do the collection and give them the percentage due to them.
“DOAS as an establishment of the law does not do double taxation. If an agent claims to have made payment to area councils, we investigate and track such claims. But where the money goes to private hands with no evidence of such payment made into area councils’ accounts, then such a business will have to bear the consequences, but where they have prove of payment, we simply make deductions before paying allocations to that area council.”
Giving a breakdown of the sharing formula of advert revenue, Dr. Adam said the six area councils are entitled to 60percent of the total revenue collected while the FCT takes 40 percent.
“That 60percent for area councils is further shared and AMAC gets the lion share of 40percent. DOAS and FCTA only gets 40percent of the total revenue generated, the area councils get the lion share. So what is the problem?
“For instance, of the recent revenue we generated, N305million that was shared in January, AMAC got N73million, the five other area councils got N22million each. So you see, N183 million went to the six area council. DOAS and FCTA only got N61 million each.
