Permanent Secretary (Special Duties) in the ministry of Finance, Budget and National Planning, Dr. Mohammed Dikwa, has disclosed that the sum of N1.024 trillion was conceded by the federal government between 2011- 2015 through four types of waivers it granted to importers.
The Permanent Secretary made the disclosure at the stakeholders’ forum for the Automation of Import Duty Exemption Certificate (IDEC) and Vehicle Number Identification (VREG) Processes which was held at the ministry’s main auditorium on Friday in Abuja.
Mr. Dikwa who was represented by Director Department of Technical Services in the ministry, Mrs Fatima Hayatu, noted that in spite of the huge concession on the part of the government, it has yet to reap the benefits.
He said; “As you all know that Import Duty Exemption Certificate is a tool used by the federal government in achieving some of its fiscal policies of increasing economic activities and employment generation in some target sectors.
“Ministry of Finance Budget and National Planning, on an annual basis receives upwards of 600,000 different requests ranging from import duty waivers on imports from different Government Agencies, Private Sector, Non-Governmental Organization (NGO)’s through its Fiscal Policy measure of granting waivers.
“Despite these huge figures it is still not clear what benefits have accrued to Government in return in terms of jobs created, additional tax revenues paid by beneficiaries and other impact to the economy.
To address the various loopholes inherent in the process of granting waivers, Mr Dikwa said the government decided to develop and manage a solution that “makes the process from application to processing, granting, validating, renewing and checking levels of utilization much easier and faster by utilizing and integrating a set of technology tools and applications.
Messrs. FourCore Technology Solutions Limited was charged with providing the infrastructure to automate the entire process end-to-end.’ including a dashboard that provides empirical data to measure the impact of this Fiscal Policy lever to the economy.
Besides investing in the technology to achieve this goal, the Ministry also invested in the digitalization of all past IDEC records and procuring the necessary technology for the responsible principal officers including an IDEC Processing Centre situated at the Ministry of Finance, Budget and National Planning.
“The second component of this project, which is the Vehicle Identification Number Registration (VREG), seeks to provide a national repository of all VINs in the country including the ones coming in through our national ports of entry. Vehicle importation accounts for about 30 percent of the total import duties alone representing a significant portion of our total import,” he said.
In her address, the Minister of Finance, Budget and National Planning, Mrs. Zainab Ahmed lamented the continued incidences of revenue losses due to manual processing of applications, incidences of multiple use of IDEC approvals, delays in processing applications, indiscriminate allocations and subjectivity in the approval process have remained major constraints in monitoring, evaluation and standardizing the process of granting waivers and certificates.
To address these, she said the the present administration conceived the project targeted at creating employment, reducing poverty, stimulating macroeconomic conditions for sustainable growth and development.
“To support these initiatives, we embarked on reforming the IDEC program. This involved re-engineering the process from application to issuance and validation by the Nigeria Customs Service (NCS) powered by digital technology,” she added.
The federal government plans to officially launch the project which intends to reposition the administration, application and processes of acquiring Import Duty Exemption Certificate (IDEC) in Nigeria before the end of the first quarter of 2020.
