By Kingsley Omonobi, Chris Ochayi & Caleb Anyansina,  Abuja
The Federal Executive Council, FEC, Friday, at an extraordinary session presided over by President Goodluck Jonathan ordered the Federal Inland Revenue Service, FIRS, to go after notorious tax evaders across the country that are owing government a whooping sum of over N170bn over the years.

The special FEC meeting was packaged by the President to deliberate on a benchmark for the 2012 budget and other sundry matters for the 2012-2015 medium term fiscal framework.

Briefing State House Correspondents at the end of the meeting, Minister of Information, Mr. Labaran Maku, said that following that approval of the FEC, the FIRS is expected to invoke the necessary tax laws in the country to recover the sum from the debtors that include individuals and corporate organisations.

He said the FEC believed that the huge sum ought to be in the federation account and be expended on national development.

The Coordinating Minister for the Economy and Minister of Finance, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, who buttressed Maku’s point, said that the decision to back the FIRS to recover the debts was one of the ways the government would raise revenue and block leakages.

She however regretted that the individuals and corporate organisations failed to pay the huge sum despite persistent demand by the FIRS; saying that out of the N170bn debt, N131bn is still under discussion to make sure that both parties agree while agreement has been reached on about N22bn.

She explained that the government would not hesitate to publish names of the tax evaders in national newspapers if they failed to offset their debts.

“Every single billion naira of resources matter, so we need to go after them. We are also going to go after Internally Generated Revenues in many parastatals to try and increase their contributions to the budget,” saying that the ultimate goal, is to diversify and grow the budget.”

Okonjo-Iweala  explained that the 2012 budget which is expected to be presented to the National Assembly in November would be based on $75 per barrel of oil with the expectation that 2.48m barrels would be produced per day by 2012; noting that the figure is expected to increase to about 2.6m barrels by 2015.

The minister also said that the government was aiming a realistic Gross Domestic Product growth rate of between seven to eight per cent as well as a single digit inflation; adding that it is the desire of government to change the direction and structure of budget by reducing deficit.

“We are trying to make sure that we stay within the three per cent fiscal deficit that is in the Fiscal Responsibility Act. We will also try and trend it down over the next four years,” stressing that one sure way of doing this, is to reduce recurrent expenditure which currently stands at 74 per cent to about 72 per cent in 2012 and below 70 per cent in 2015.

Besides, she noted that having identified that a fair share of the recurrent expenditure goes to personnel, the government would intensify efforts aimed at weeding out ghost workers and pensioners through the use of biometrics.

The minister also disclosed the desire of the Federal Government to gradually increase capital spending from between 25 and 27 per cent now, to 32 per cent by 2015, noting that the government also intended to keep reducing domestic borrowing.

While saying that N862bn was borrowed in 2010, the minister said that the government planned to reduce the figure to below N800bn and keep reducing it so that the nation could have a sustainable domestic borrowing situation.

Okonjo-Iweala said 55 per cent of the 2011 budget has so far been implemented, while the rest, would be accelerated to meet the December 31, 2011 date of the end of the fiscal year; that one of the underlying factors of the 2012 budget was to complete uncompleted projects.

She itemised the priorities of the budget to include works, power, agriculture, Information and Communication Technology, housing, manufacturing, education, health, security and job creation among others.

Maku and Okonjo-Iweala were joined at the briefing by the Minister of State for Finance,

Dr. Yerima Ngama; and the Director General of the Budget Office of the Federation, Dr. Bright Okogu