Banks to report accounts with N25m quarterly turnover to tax agency – Taiwo Oyedele

Taiwo Oyedele, chairman of the presidential fiscal policy and tax reforms committee, says the tax reform laws will mandate commercial banks to report accounts with N25 million quarterly turnover to the tax agency.

Speaking on Friday during a media parley on the tax reform laws, Oyedele said the tax reforms increased the reporting threshold from N10 million to N25 million.

“What this one has done is that it has raised the threshold for reporting your bank account. I think it was N10 million before, but it is now N25 million, which translates to N100 million,” he said.

He said on January 13, 2020, the Finance Act introduced a requirement for individuals and businesses to connect their tax identification number (TIN) to bank accounts “if you are using it for business or for any income, like a salary earner”.

Since then, Oyedele said some individuals and businesses had been complying with the directive.

He said this requirement of “putting TIN in your business account” is one of the reforms his committee considered, “so we moved it to the new laws”.

“But because the level of tax awareness in Nigeria is so poor, people are finding out so many things for the first time,” Oyedele said.

“They just assume that the new tax law is introducing them. This one is actually not.”

Clarifying his statement in a chat with TheCable, Oyedele said “the context is that the current tax law already requires the filing of customer’s information by banks to the tax authority while the new law prescribes a mandatory disclosure for threshold of N25m per quarter (for an individual) and N100m (for a company) under the new law”.(The Cable)