By Innocent Akamba
Since the current administration of His Excellency, Senator Bassey Otu assumed the reins a little over a year ago, he has made transparency, fiscal responsibility and accountability one of the cardinal planks of his government.
This does not, however, exclude the running of government agencies such as the state’s Internal Revenue Service (IRS), under whose watch has seen an exponential leap in revenue accruals to the government to above average of 60.6% in just one year.
This could only have been achieved through diligent, aggressive, effective, efficient and transparent tax automation process instituted by Governor Otu.
This explains why improvement in the transparent and accountable tax administration of the Cross River State IRS has also earned the agency plaudits from a vast concourse of Cross Riverians for the rare feat.
The Service is not resting on its oars to continually improve the state IGR, knowing the commitment of the Governor to drive development and trigger a positive economic turnaround.
However, there are still doubting Thomases, just as there will always be scatterbrained Thomases, incurable cynics and skeptics who are bent on gaslighting the government in order to either trend or distract or perhaps both.
It is against the background of the activities of these merchants of mischief such as a certain Austin Ibok whose communication/writing skills have of late, mysteriously attained some incredible level of coherence, that we are inclined to challenge him to come open and with facts at his disposal regarding the day-to-day operations at the state’s Internal Revenue Service.
Ordinarily, Ibok who signed off as “writing from my balcony” should not have deserved any response for his posers until he provides, according to him, “in my next write-up, full details of transactions involving companies used in siphoning public funds.”
Suffice it, however, to say that the IRS remains strongly committed to improving the revenue profile of the state by abiding strictly by the international best practices of due process, transparency and accountability.
Accordingly, government revenue from taxes will continue to be meticulously paid into the government account, judiciously managed for the well-being of the citizenry, and never lodged into individuals accounts. International best practice allows for two approaches to revenue collection; for instance, there is Target Driven system and also Commission Based system.
The State IRS has adopted both approaches which allows some transactional based taxes to be paid through target based system where the consultants are given targets and made to either pay upfront or at the end of each month. This has assisted in growing the revenue of the State including the Ministerial revenue by over 250% in the past 9 months.
As the government continue the ongoing automation process, the expectation is to gradually bring every one into the tax net and reduce the prevalence of allowing direct collections by consultants and encourage payments into the government account where they will be paid based on commission.
With the adopted measures, leakages are promptly addressed and all funds are directly deposited into the government account.
Through effective and efficient revenue drive, the administration has also been able to reactivate the State Reserve Fund account, that had laid dormant for about eight years but which currently holds a balance of 3.7 billion naira, meant for unforeseen circumstances.
Governor Otu’s administration, through prudent resource allocation, has ensured that the state government has met its debt and contractual obligations amounting to over N55 billion from the beginning of this administration to the present.
Only a responsible administration, such as the one currently led by Governor Bassey Otu in Cross River State, could have achieved these milestones.
While other agencies of government, such as CRISSA and SUBEB, mentioned by the timid author from the balcony, are no different in terms of effective and efficient service delivery, yet, we do not doubt that they are autonomous of each other, as their performances under the leadership of Governor Bassey Otu are equally a testament to his People First agenda of service delivery. We await the nitwit who writes from his balcony for his full details of transactions involving the IRS.
Written By
Innocent Akamba
For People First mandate support groups
27/06/2024
