The Federal Government said it is planning to reduce the cost of tax expenditure and ensure tax incentives aimed at impacting the economy positively.
The Ministry of Finance made this known on Monday in a statement by spokesperson, Mohammed Manga.
Manga said to achieve this, the Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister of the Economy, Wale Edun, recently approved the inclusion of an Incentive Monitoring and Evaluation Platform (IMEP) in the current Import Duty Exemption Certificate (IDEC) process.
He added that the IDEC automation which was introduced on March 1, 2020, is a Fiscal incentive by the federal government under the Ministry of Finance to boost sectors of the economy.
Manga said the FG aims to achieve this by exempting critical players from paying import duty and all other statutory customs charges respectively.
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“This is to provide the Federal Ministry of Finance with a robust automated tool for more effective Monitoring and `Evaluation (M&E) measurement of the impact of all customs duty exemptions issued by the Ministry to government entities, companies, non-governmental oganisations (NGOs) and international organisations,” Edun said.
According to Edun, the system is designed to provide a framework to exclude and restrict ineligible applicants.
It will also help to enforce strict compliance to fiscal policy measures and provide a robust impact analysis of tax incentives on the economy.
He said this will further eliminate the misuse of tax expenditures and support the delivery of economic outcomes from fiscal incentives.
The Minister of Finance added that this will strengthen the direct measurement of the impact of tax incentives on the economy.
He listed the key features of the IMEP to comprise: duty waiver claw back mechanism for issuance of demand notices to defaulters.
According to him, this would prevent the misuse of issued incentive, e-report generation, a centralised database and factory geo-location tagging.
Edun said it would also help in the areas of industry qualification status validation and inter- ministries department and agency (MDA) integration.
The Minister said a webinar would be conducted on Tuesday, April 23 to provide clarity on the revised IDEC process.
