By Chioma Onuegbu

Uyo—An Uyo-based non-governmental organisation, Policy Alert, has called on the Akwa Ibom State House of Assembly to ensure that the state’s proposed Internal Revenue Service Bill protects the rights of the most vulnerable taxpayers, especially women and others in the informal sector of the economy.

Gov Emmanuel Udom

The group, in a statement, yesterday, in Uyo, during a public hearing on a ‘Bill to Make Provisions for Administration and Collection of Revenue due to State and Local Government Councils’ organised by the House Committee on Appropriations and Finance, observed that a number of operational weaknesses and gaps in the extant legal framework for revenue administration in the state had continued to undermine the rights of the weakest and poorest tax payers in the past 16 years.

The statement, by the Head of Programmes, Tijah Bolton-Akpan, listed some of the challenges of revenue administration in the state to include weak administrative structure, high-handedness of revenue collectors, lack of transparency and accountability, and unduly high tax burden on the informal sector.

It recommended that the bill should curb arbitrariness and reduce the excessive tax burdens on market men and women, tricycle operators and street hawkers by strengthening provisions relating to local government revenue committees.

“We believe that room for abuse and other excesses of tax collectors as currently experienced can be avoided by outlawing the use of agents and consultants for the collection of taxes, restricting the definition of revenue collector in the bill to the bona fide employees of the Internal Revenue Service.”