Hello Guys,
It’s been a quite eventful week. If you’re reading this from Nigeria, I hope you have been keeping safe amidst the protests and unrest within the different parts of the country. The conversation has definitely gone beyond Nigeria and the world is definitely watching as events unfold. Last week, I introduced the topic of this series, ‘Automation: The Gift and the Curse! This is Part 2.
If you have been following the recent #EndSARS protests in Nigeria for instance, you would observe how quick information is being circulated especially aided by social media. With our mobile phones, laptops and other devices, we can receive updates on live information as it is happening all in real time. This is one of the gifts of automation – access to the world right from our fingertips and at a snap of our fingers. Well, I should add a caveat though that this unrestricted and quick access could very well also be a function of your internet speed or connection. Lol
About five years ago, Nigeria had a population of roughly 180 million people. Tax eligible citizens across the world have been estimated to usually be about 40% of the country’s populace as this is assumed to be the nation’s working population. Applying these statistics to Nigeria, as at 2015, the estimated number of eligible taxpayers in Nigeria would have been put at about 72 million. However, as at this time, Nigeria boasted of a paltry 14 million taxpayers. With largely manual processes, the process of tax administration and compliance was hardly efficient and the result of this was a generally low level of compliance, further resulting in significant loss of revenue for the government.
However, the introduction of automated processes across the tax sector further aided by innovative technological tools created by players both in the Public and the Private Sectors saw tax compliance increase significantly as more taxpayers had easier, faster and more efficient and effective ways to ensure tax compliance. One of such products, TaxiTPay was designed to ease the compliance process for taxpayers allowing tax payments across the over 900 tax collecting authorities including both the Federal government, 37 State Inland Revenue Authorities (including the FCT-IRS) and the 774 Local Government Authorities among other authorities including Ministries, departments and Agencies (MDAs) with technological functionalities and integration possibilities.
TaxiTPay is designed as an API service that allows integrations across the various government revenue collection agencies and ease the compliance process generally, generating real time receipting and available across various channels including web, mobile and USSD among others. TaxiTPay is available on: https://www.taxitpay.com.ng. The functionalities of TaxiTPay are not restricted to just tax payments as the platform also supports inter-bank transfers, pension payments and vendor payments as well as utility and bill payments through its TaxiTMart interface available on http://www.mart.taxitpay.com.ng.
Did you miss the 1st Africa Data Protection Conclave last week? You should visit: https://www.africadpconclave.com to catch up on the highlights from the event which is still one of the most talked about events from last week (of course besides the #EndSARS protests). Lol.
Please remember you can carry out your organization’s self-audit and assessments ahead of your statutory data protection compliance audits with NITDA using our solution, iDAP. Visit: http://www.idap.ndpr.ng.
Have you experienced a data breach recently or at any time? Let’s help you get the needed closure or justice. Use our Report Data Breach platform at http://www.rdb.ndpr.ng.
Next week, we shall look at another gift of automation in the form of another product from Taxtech. We shall also take a cursory look at how Automation can be a curse over the next few weeks too. Please stay tuned.
GB