Mon May 24 2021 Mohammed Alkali is the Executive Chairman of the Borno State Internal Revenue Service (BO-IRS). Here, he explains the changes carried out to improve accountability and efficiency in the service.
You worked with the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) before your appointment as Executive Chairman of BO-IRS. How did you meet BO-IRS? We found it doing well, but there were gaps which should have been closed. In fact, what we are doing now is to build on what they were doing and try to close some of the gaps. We discovered that there were gaps in terms of compliance with the relevant acts, as well as in human resources, because there were only 113 employees, and the last time a recruitment exercise was conducted was 20 years ago despite the fact that the work and the scope of the service was expanded. So, we immediately engaged 88 ad hoc personnel, mostly graduates in business-related courses, including economics, finance, banking and statistics, in February and we paid their salaries punctually. They have impacted our operations because we are using them to raise the compliance level in terms of taxation.