Nigerian banks to hock up with tax authority on information exchange

In her bids to widen its tax net, Nigeria is planning to implement the Common Reporting Standards to enable Africa's top economy to obtain information on taxpayer through their banks.
The CRS, a standard for automatic exchange of bank accounts information on individuals and certain types of entities allows countries automatic access to corporate and individual accounts and enable such country to share the information with other countries within the protocol.
The West African country had in August last year signed the Multilateral Competent Authority Agreement (MCAA) on the CRS. hile it commenced an Automatic Exchange of Tax Information (AETI) on overseas assets held by Nigerians with some foreign countries.
The implementation of CRS commercial lenders in the country would be compelled to submit information about their customers, identity numbers and bank verification numbers (BVN), among others to the tax authorities.
With this, the tax authorities can then share such information with any other country that has signed up to the CRS.
According to sources, once Nigeria authority obtains such information it then can share with other countries within the protocol.
Nigeria recently created a scheme to enable tax evaders to voluntarily comply so as to avoid being prosecuted or penalised for breaching the country's tax law.
The scheme, Voluntary Assets and Income Declaration Scheme (VAIDS) will come to a close by the end of next month.
Ghana became the first African country to sign up to CRS and should be submitting information on the platform to members within the protocol this year.
Sources said many Nigerian bank may start scrambling to acquire the technology to drive the CRS for easy collection of data and also enable the tax authorities to have similar technology that they can use to submit such data.
When the process becomes fully operational, the tax authorities would have been empowered to come after those who have not taken advantage of the amnesty period provided by VAIDS to prosecute them.