The Senate has requested that the Central Bank of Nigeria and the Federal Inland Revenue Services (FIRS) provide detailed information on the revenue generated and utilisation from stamp duty payments.
Chairman of the Senate Committee on Public Accounts, Aliyu Wadada, made this known in Abuja on Thursday.
Mr Wadada said the investigation is aimed at ensuring that the government maximises its revenue from the stamp duty, which, according to him, is a significant source of income for the country.
The lawmaker said the committee had written to all commercial banks to furnish it with information, accompanied by figures on how much each bank or collectively all the commercial banks had generated as stamp duty revenue from 2016 to 2024.
“It is, of course, by law expected that whatever these commercial banks put together as revenue from stamp duty charged by the banks is or is supposed to be remitted to CBN.
“So the committee has written to the CBN to furnish it with information, accompanied by figures as to how much has actually been remitted by these commercial banks to the CBN and how much the CBN has remitted to the TSA. The second category is, of course, limited liability companies and oil and gas companies. They also charged stamp duty like commercial banks. The committee has also written to them.
“This committee has also written to the FIRS for it to furnish the committee with information that should also be accompanied by figures as to how much FIRS has generated on this category of stamp duty,” he said.
Mr Wadada said that, given the need to make the exercise all-encompassing, the committee had also written to the Nigerian Governors Forum (NGF) to provide information on the amount they had received as proceeds from stamp duty.
He said, given the effort and commitment of Mr Tinubu’s administration to provide needed infrastructure, concerted efforts should be made to ensure the generation of revenue and its effective utilisation for the good of Nigerians.
Mr Wadada said the amount expected to be generated from stamp duty as revenue was humongous, adding that the legislature should ask questions on revenue generated and utilised.
He said that for a fair understanding of the expected revenue from stamp duty, the committee has written to the organisations to make comparisons with its own data on revenue generated from stamp duty.
“Because the angles are different, we must write to generate information from the various agencies or bodies that I have mentioned.
“We will reconcile the figure we have and see at what point to ask questions, invite, or possibly summon whoever needs to be invited or whoever needs to be summoned. Our consultants have already done a fair job and submitted some data to us, but, you know, this data is not just enough to now go public.
“We wanted to make sure that what they have reported is actually what is there. That’s why we were demanding that this documentation should reach the committee so that we can do a comparative analysis,” he said.
Mr Wadada said the organisations were expected to respond to the committee on or before November 25.
(NAN)