Telecommunications operators are calling on the Federal Government not to only suspend the five per cent excise tax on telecoms sector but to remove it completely from the Finance Act.
Speaking under the aegis of the Association of Licensed Telecommunications Operators of Nigeria (ALTON), the Chairman, Gbenga Adebayo, said the body welcomed the development and thanked President Bola Tinubu for the suspension, however, reminded the public that the immediate past Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Prof. Isa Pantami, had made a case to ex-President Muhammadu Buhari for the exemption of telecoms sector from the tax.
With that in mind, Adebayo, while speaking on a National television, said the body has mentioned before that the burden of the collection of the five per cent tax will be on the telecoms operators, while the weight of the tax itself would be on the subscribers because currently, there is a 7.5 per cent value-added tax (VAT) on every service offered by operators, “if another five per cent is added, it will go to 12.5 per cent and that would have grave implications on the cost of services to end users.
This, according to Adebayo is because the telecoms sector currently faces over 39 different taxes and levies across the country.
He said, while some are captured in several statues and others not in any, quite a number of them are repeated at Federal and State levels and subsequently decrease the cost of providing services to end users.
Join our twitter community :