Nyesom Wike, the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, has approved a draft property tax rule for property owners in Abuja.
In accordance with the provisions of the Capital Gains Tax Act of 2004, the FCT’s Internal Revenue Service has begun enforcing the capital gains tax in Abuja.
In a year of assessment, the CGT levies a 10 per cent tax on the entire amount of chargeable profits that any individual makes from the sale of chargeable assets (after deducting permitted expenses from the computation of such gains).
Haruna Abdullahi, the Executive Chairman of the FCT-IRS, told media in Abuja on Sunday that the capital city’s revenue service has increased its Internally Generated Revenue to around N140 billion.
In response to the service’s efforts to increase income for the FCT, Abdullahi stated that the minister has authorised certain major initiatives to that end.
According to him:
“In the last three weeks, the minister has approved some initiatives that are huge and will certainly change the dynamics in terms of the bottom line. Just the other day, we submitted a draft proposal to the minister for the FCT property tax regulation.
“The FCT-IRS Act empowers the minister to come up with a property tax regulation for the FCT. So we had a long conversation and we suggested it to the minister, and he asked us to come up with a draft regulation, which we did, and he has approved the initiative.
“So we have an inter-agency collaboration whereby we review it because the draft was just done by the FCT-IRS, but that’s not enough, you need other stakeholders. So he approved the initiative to go ahead and review the draft and then come back.
“Subsequently at the end of the day, he will sign the regulation and is gazetted and implemented. So that alone should tell you that there is a huge positive impact on the bottom line of the IGR in the city.”
cc: Punch Ng
