Chairman of the Presidential Fiscal Policy and Tax Reforms Committee, Mr Taiwo Oyedele, has attributed the controversy surrounding the harmonisation and gazetting of the new tax laws to possible process and system failures, rather than deliberate wrongdoing.
Oyedele said the issues observed should not be reduced to finger-pointing or a search for who to blame, noting that the law-making process involves several stages where manual handling could result in errors.
“I think it’s a process and system issue that has to be addressed, and I don’t think it is about finger-pointing or looking for who to blame,” he said. “If you think about the process today, there are a lot of stages with manual hands-on that anything can go wrong.”
He explained that the presence of top government officials at the signing of the law does not imply that every detail of the voluminous document was exhaustively reviewed at that point.
According to him, the fact that the President, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, the Senate President and other officials were present during the signing does not mean that all 400 pages of the legislation could have been read and cross-checked on the spot.
Oyedele therefore called on the public to exercise patience and allow ongoing investigations to determine what went wrong in the harmonisation and gazetting process of the tax laws.
