Taxes & Tariffs | |
Taxes & Tariffs | |
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Friday, December 20, 2019 / 06:47PM / By Faye & Fraser Briefing Note / Header Image Credit: PM News
When Fowler was appointed in
2015 there was some relief, even rejoicing, at his taking over the reins from
the then Acting Chairman, Samuel Ogungbesan. This was because
Ogungbesan, who had taken over from Kabir Mashi, was perceived as high
handed and rash.
As soon as he was named Acting
Chairman, he quickly set about throwing his weight around and letting everyone
know he was in charge. However, anyone who thought his excesses were the worst
they had seen was in for a rude shock. (Iron law of Nigeria: No matter how
bad things are, they can always be worse). The joy and celebration at his
exit quickly proved to be premature once Fowler was in position.
In the euphoria of Fowler's
arrival, many missed the early signs of trouble. On the first day he set foot
inside the FIRS offices, he turned up with a full posse of armed policemen and
plainclothes bodyguards in dark goggles, with loud sirens for added emphasis.
He quickly rejected the official Toyota Camry assigned to him, opting for a
more befitting Lexus Jeep.
Things only got worse from
there. It became increasingly clear that whatever Fowler's strengths were, tax
administration was not one of them.
One key failure of the Fowler
administration was the absence of a full governing Board to check some
of his excesses. Then again, he was an expert at ignoring and circumventing due
process so the presence of a Board may have been much of a muchness. If the
lack of a Board was the federal government's fault, the total jettisoning of
the regular management meetings was all his work. The management meetings used
to hold twice a quarter with other emergency management meetings called when
needed.
Fowler simply never held such
meetings - at most he would randomly assemble the attendees and inform them of
a decision he had made. Directors and other senior staff were kept in line
under pain of being sent to different locations of the dreaded Training School
- a posting to irrelevance and redundancy which often spelt the end of your
career. This generated an incredible amount of bad blood when it became obvious
that such postings were often done to make room for a Fowler appointee to take
over a unit or department.
Alternatively, Fowler routinely
created Units and Directorates to accommodate specific individuals he wanted to
bring into the FIRS. In this manner, the 'Research and Development' unit
was created to be headed by one Dr. Akinfala, a clear duplication of the
already existing Planning, Research and Statistics Department. All that
Dr. Akinfala ended up doing was something called a 'Business Environment Scan' report which in reality was just a collation of business news
stories from newspapers. The Relationship Management Unit was also created and
headed by a certain Mr. Eniola.
Their remit was apparently to
provide quick response and special services for specific taxpayers in
designated sectors of the economy. Yet this is precisely what local tax offices
- where taxpayers accounts are actually domiciled - are set up to do. Then
there was the Office of the Special Assistant to the Chairman on ICT. There was
already an ICT Department headed by a Director before Fowler's creation of this
new office. This Director also wore the hat of acting coordinating director of
the FIRS IT modernisation support project. Fowler stripped him of this role and
handed practically all his tasks to the new Special Assistant (who had no
management experience before being parachuted into FIRS).
Where some useful and needed
units were created, the way he staffed them meant they never had the effect
they could have had. An Efficiency Unit was created and headed by a
Director, Faramade Ogunsanya, who had worked with Fowler during his
stint at Lagos Internal Revenue Service (LIRS). This turned out to be an
overkill as the Unit did not need to be a full directorate. In the end, Mr.
Ogunsanya ended up with a big title and barely any work to do. A Value Added
Tax (VAT) Department was created and headed by one Arnold Staff who was quickly
replaced by a Fowler acolyte, Mr. Adefeegbe. A lady, Lovette Ononuga,
was made Deputy Director of the of the department in charge of Northern
Nigeria. She had previously been an analyst at a Mercedes Benz dealership in
Milton Keynes in the United Kingdom.
The FIRS under Fowler went on a
two-year recruitment spree to the delight of no one but the recruits
themselves. Employment was for the most part arbitrary (subject to the mood,
whims and good graces of Fowler himself) with hardly any due process followed
other than obtaining the endorsement of the Federal Character Commission, who
needed little motivation to approve.
Fowler didn't stop employing
both Staff and Youth Corp members even when it became clear that the financial
and logistic cost to the FIRS was unbearable. The result today is that there
are FIRS offices around the country where the staff have no seats, to say
nothing of laptops or even work schedules. When Fowler took over the FIRS, the
organisation had a staff strength of 7,500.
By the end of his tenure the
number was around the 10,000 mark. The FIRS had before Fowler stopped taking on
Youth Corpers but he resumed this and today there are around 2,000 of them on
the books of the FIRS. While the hiring of Youth Corpers is in itself not a bad
thing, Fowler effectively turned them into staff members, and paid them as
such, even though he called them 'Tax Volunteers'.
Today the FIRS not only have
more staff than it needs, and worse, many of the corpers are being owed
their pay. As a result, promotions became scarce with the consequent
frustration of staff members. Yet Fowler kept recruiting even up to his
penultimate week in office.
Unprofessionalism got so out of
hand that Fowler's friends (who were not FIRS staff) had the power to present
Memos to him for favour's for their own friends in the FIRS, influence
postings, sit in on his official meetings, and summon Directors to instruct
them on sundry issues.
Still, not everything about
Fowler's tenure was bad. Without a doubt, many staff will miss the endless
opportunities for partying. The FIRS have over the past three years become one
of the biggest sponsors of comedy shows and concerts in Abuja, the nation's
capital. Artistes and comedians from Davido to Chuks the General, all
benefitted from the FIRS largesse. The jury remains out on what effect this
kind of sponsorship had on tax collection.
As things are, Mohammed Nami -
himself a thoroughly unremarkable fellow - will be faced with a mountain to
climb in dismantling the administrative mess built by his predecessor. There
were wild celebrations in FIRS offices and Whatsapp chat groups when it was
confirmed that Fowler would not be returning.
But that Iron Law of Nigeria must never be forgotten...
Credits
This post, Fowler's Fouls first appeared in Faye & Fraser Briefing
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