We Won’t Increase Taxes In 2021 – FG

The Federal Government will not increase or introduce a set of fresh taxes in 2021, the Minister of Finance, Zainab Ahmed has said.

She recently revealed that FG would focus on activities that will lessen the burden of taxation on Nigerians, while also reflating the economy.

According to her, Nigerians have had tough times, especially amid the Covid 19 pandemic and after the fall of crude oil in the international market, so the government will not make things worse.

She added that a new bill has been passed that centers mainly on taxation and tax administration with comprehensive reforms aimed at exempting small companies from paying company income tax.

Her words, “What we don’t have in the finance bill 2020 is an increase in tax. There are no new taxes that are being introduced and there is no increase in taxes. There are also no new incentives that have been introduced in this bill and will introduce tax reform that has been introduced is geared towards supporting financial stimulus while there are also tax measures that are short, focused, and uncontroversial.

“The bill also makes provisions to create a legal framework for the creation of a crisis intervention fund that will address crisis that may arise in future, while introducing provisions that allow for the recovery of donations made towards the Covid-19 pandemic and other potential crises.”

“We also need to defer tax rate increases to the domestic economic sufficiently recover and reduce the compliance burden on taxpayers in line with the ease of doing business reforms.

“The second principle is the need to reform fiscal incentives policies to help reduce proliferation of fiscal incentives by carefully assessing cost vs benefit of tax incentives and prioritize job creation, growth, and incentives.

“The government also needs closer coordination of monetary, trade, and fiscal. This is necessary so that government will be able to align existing tax incentives for lending to agriculture with the recent CBN moratorium and interest rate reduction for agriculture and real sector loans, reform the stamp duty level on banking transaction and make provisions that will help harness funds in form of unclaimed dividends and an unclaimed bank balance that has been sitting idle.”