The Abuja Municipal Area Council, AMAC, says it is tackling unscrupulous individuals hiding under its cover to extort money from businesses and residents under the guise of tax collection.
Chief Revenue Officer of AMAC, Hon. Danlami Awaje, disclosed this while responding to allegations first published by the International Centre for Investigative Reporting, ICIR, that the activities of some of the council officials are having negative impacts on businesses in Abuja.
Awaje spoke on ‘Public Conscience on Radio’, the anti-corruption radio programme produced by the Progressive Impact Organization for Community Development, PRIMORG, on Wednesday in Abuja.
Awaje noted that the tales of taxation fraud in AMAC had been a recurring issue, but revealed that the council had set up a task force team which moves round to fish out individuals who pose as AMAC officials to defraud unsuspecting business owners and residents through taxes and levies.
He said: “AMAC has set up a taskforce that is moving around, checking and looking out for individuals who are not AMAC staff but are extorting and collecting revenue from business owners and residents.
“Following outcry from the public, the council also disbanded a group set up to bring sanity on the roads but were harassing and extorting money from car owners on the road.”
Awaje warned that AMAC does not give out personal bank account numbers when collecting taxes but uses government-approved platform ‘REMITA’ in order to promote accountability.
“AMAC’s revenue officers who go out to collect revenues undergo training and retraining from time to time. We have REMITA platform where we ask all our taxpayers to pay into, generate RRR, pay through REMITA, come with the evidence of payment and obtain official receipt from our office,” he said.
On her part, an Abuja-based food vendor identified as Chef Nneka, whose business has been affected by the arbitrary taxes, decried the lack of impact in the form of infrastructure despite the numerous taxes collected by the AMAC administration.
“I pay my own taxes in January because if you don’t pay, they will keep harassing you until you pay, but they (AMAC) are not doing anything for us.
“In a year, I pay for bikes, health, environment, business premises, outdoor signage, radio and television licenses and it goes on and on. And just yesterday, I was served another paper to pay N300,000 for gas emission,” she lamented.
Earlier, senior lecturer of Law, Base University, Dr. Sam Amadi, explained that people living in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) risk paying multiple taxes because most of the taxes that apply for federal workers also apply for people working under FCT.
Dr. Amadi cautioned that FCT is going to have problems dealing with navigating between federal taxation and that of the councils.
“Now think in terms of Julius Berger; you will be shocked that maybe it might not be paying anything to the area council but might be paying directly to the federal government. And because there is no capacity to compel them, the council will leave them and go to the small or micro enterprises and overtax them,” he said.