FIRS revenue collection drops by N90bn

The Federation Accounts Allocations Committee (FAAC) has disclosed that the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) had a revenue shortfall of about N90 billion between May and June.
The Chairman of Forum of Finance Commissioners, Mahmoud Yunusa, made the disclosure at the weekend in an interactive session (L-R) Chief Executive Officer China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC), Yuan Guangyu, Chief Operating Officer (COO), Ventures, Dr.
Victor Adeniran, and Chief Operating Officer Upstream, Mallam Rabiu Bello, NNNPC, during CNOOC’s visit to the NNPC Towers recently Photo: NNPC with finance journalists in Abuja.
He said that the Committee will engage with FIRS to understand the reason for the sharp drop in collection.
“If you look at the FAAC report, there was a sharp drop in FIRS’s May and June collections but there was not opportunity for us to actually engage the FIRS for them to explain to us why there was a sharp drop.
I can’t remember vividly but the drop was about N90 billion.
So FIRS also need to tell us why the sharp drop.” “Every revenue generating agency has a target, and we will apply the necessary rules to ensure that we get value for why every revenue generating agency was established,” Yunusa insisted.
The Chairman of Finance Commissioners, who also doubles as the Adamawa state commissioner of Finance, further explained that said that after settling the NNPC issue it would beam its search light on other revenue generating agencies saying that “by the time we solve this problem, we will look at other issues within the NNPC and other parastatals under ministry of finance and the petroleum.” According to Yunusa, the national oil corporation is getting much attention because it is the major driver of the country’s economy.
He said: “All the tiers of government rely to some extent, on the revenue that is driven from the centre and the major contributor of that revenue from the Centre is NNPC and we can’t afford not to fix whatever problem we see or we presume is there on NNPC.” On the issue of hiring a forensic auditors and consultant to work with the NNPC as suggested by the Federation Account Allocation Committee elsewhere in March, the Chairman of the Forum said, we are on course, but we want to take these problems one after the other.
The Federal Accounts Allocations Committee (FAAC) has deadlocked for three times following Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) ‘under-remittance’ to the federation account.
But the NNPC had earlier this month in a press statement justified its remittance saying it was in line with its agreement with the governor