Taiwo Oyedele, chairman of the presidential fiscal policy and tax reforms committee, says the tax reform laws will mandate commercial banks to report accounts with N25 million quarterly turnover to the tax agency.
Speaking on Friday during a media parley on the tax reform
laws, Oyedele said the tax reforms increased the reporting threshold from N10
million to N25 million.
“What this one has done is that it has raised the threshold
for reporting your bank account. I think it was N10 million before, but it is
now N25 million, which translates to N100 million,” he said.
He said on January 13, 2020, the Finance Act introduced a
requirement for individuals and businesses to connect their tax identification
number (TIN) to bank accounts “if you are using it for business or for any
income, like a salary earner”.
Since then, Oyedele said some individuals and businesses had
been complying with the directive.
He said this requirement of “putting TIN in your business
account” is one of the reforms his committee considered, “so we moved it to the
new laws”.
“But because the level of tax awareness in Nigeria is so
poor, people are finding out so many things for the first time,” Oyedele said.
“They just assume that the new tax law is introducing them.
This one is actually not.”
Clarifying his statement in a chat with TheCable, Oyedele
said “the context is that the current tax law already requires the filing of
customer’s information by banks to the tax authority while the new law
prescribes a mandatory disclosure for threshold of N25m per quarter (for an
individual) and N100m (for a company) under the new law”.
‘BANKS, CBN, FIRS HAVE NO AUTHORITY TO UNILATERALLY WITHDRAW
FUNDS FROM CUSTOMERS’ ACCOUNTS’
Oyedele said no authority has the power to deduct money
directly from individuals’ bank accounts.
“Even if you have N1 billion in the account, nobody can
debit your bank account. That’s why I took you through the process of, if
you’re not paying your taxes, they write to you, write back, you do final
assessment, conclusive, and then you go to court, and then it’s a long
process,” Oyedele said.
“I have been in this space for three decades. I have not
seen — the power, which is in the law — one instance where they have used it in
Nigeria before.”
The tax expert said contrary to claims, neither the Federal
Inland Revenue Service (FIRS), the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), banks, nor
any other government agency has the authority to unilaterally withdraw funds
from personal or business bank accounts.
“No one has the power to debit your account. In the law,
there is what we call power of substitution. In some countries, they will say
garnishee order,” he said.
“This is the order where if the money you earn is plenty,
let’s say if you have like N200 million tax to pay, the taxman can go through
the stress of sending your assessment, your debt to go to court to determine
who is right.
“He can say ‘pay’, the court said you should pay. You refuse
to pay. They say, but you have money in your account.”
Oyedele added that after such a court order has been
obtained, the bank is informed that the affected party owes some amount of
money to the government and has refused to pay.
“That’s the extreme case when they use it. It will not apply
to anyone that I know in Nigeria,” he said.
“But you cannot remove that power from the law because it
may become necessary, right?
“So I think the message to all Nigerians is nobody is taking
any amount from their bank account. Whether their bank account has 50k or 50
million, nobody is taking anything from the bank account.”
On September 9, the federal government gazetted Nigeria’s
new tax reform laws, with implementation set to begin on January 1, 2026.
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