Federation Account: Customs remit N653bn in 11 months

A total amount of N653.47bn was remitted into the federation account by the Nigeria Customs Service between January and November this year.

Details of the revenue remittance are contained in a document presented to the Federation Account Allocation Committee.

The committee, headed by the Minister of State for Finance, Mrs Zainab Ahmed, is made up of commissioners for finance from the 36 states of the federation, the Accountant-General of the Federation, Alhaji Ahmed Idris, and representatives from the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation.

Others are representatives from the Federal Inland Revenue Service, the Nigeria Customs Service; Revenue Mobilisation, Allocation and Fiscal Commission as well as the Central Bank of Nigeria

The federation account is currently being managed on a legal framework that allows funds to be shared under three major components –statutory allocation, Value Added Tax distribution, and allocation made under the derivation principle.

In the presentation, the service said the N653.47bn was generated from six major sources of revenue.

They are import duty where the sum of N553bn was collected within the 11 months period, excise duty which generated N53.63bn and fees which raked in N2.42bn.

Other sources of revenue during the period are auction sales which generated N803.24m, penalty charges where N996.24m was collected and special levy where the sum of N44.42bn was collected.

Further breakdown of the N653.47bn revenue collection of customs showed that the sum of N58.37bn was remitted into the federation account in January while February, March and April recorded remittances of N48.06bn, N52.48bn and N58.45bn respectively.

In the month of May, the service paid the sum of N58.65bn into the government coffers while N61.45bn, N55.79bn, N63.81bn were remitted in the months of June, July and August respectively.

For the month of September, the service paid N62.21bn into the treasury while October and November had N67.02bn and N67.12bn remitted respectively.

The document read in part, “The collection of N64, 793,029.05 in the month of November 2018, accounts for 91.63 per cent of the 2018 approved monthly budget of N70,710,977,858.08.

“This is lower that October 2018 collection of N67,351,872,142.87 by N2,558,842,964.82 or 3.8 per cent.

This is attributable to a decrease in the volume of dutiable imports and excise duty in the month under review relative to the preceding month.

“The transfer to the federation account by the CBN for the month amounted to N67, 127,207,831.3, while charges deducted by the designated banks amounted to N19, 437,908.75.”

The Minister of Finance had on Friday expressed optimism that the ministry would continue to boost revenue generation to improve the fiscal space for spending.

To increase revenue, she said the Federal Government would be implementing more public financial management reforms.

She said, “To take advantage of innovative technologies, we plan to leverage data, technological tools and platforms to foster collaboration, grow the revenue base and improve collections.

“Given the span of stakeholders that form our port community and for the sake of improving ease of doing business, we plan to deploy a national single window/trade platform that we expect to enhance customs collections to about 90 per cent over a few years.

“We will also improve collaboration between our revenue collection agencies including the Nigeria Customs Service, Federal Inland Revenue Service and other trade partners to share information and intelligence that will help improve revenue and make collections more efficient.