The Borno government says it is targeting N25 billion internally generated revenue (IGR) in 2025 as against the N19 billion for this year.

Bello Ibrahim, the chairman of the Borno State Internal Revenue Service, made this known in an interview with journalists on Sunday in Maiduguri.

Mr Ibrahim announced that the agency had already generated over N18 billion as of September, adding that by the end of November, it would have surpassed its 2024 projections of N19 billion.

“We are looking at generating N25 billion in 2025, God willing. We will intensify efforts to leverage the little peace we are gaining in the state and expand the scope of our collections,” said Mr Ibrahim.

The chairman said the increase in the state’s projected IGR in 2025 was instrumental to an innovative tax drive via automated process, which had dramatically changed the fortune of revenue collection in the state.

According to him, the state revenue service has been consistently raising the state revenue collection more than many states in the North-East with the introduction of automated processes in revenue collection.

“If you do a comparative analysis, three years, 2021, this agency was able to generate only N10 billion; in 2022, we managed to generate a little over N17 billion.

“In 2023, we generated N19.4 or N19.6 billion, that’s almost N20 billion,  and if you consider Borno State and other states that did not experience this insurgency, you will appreciate the fact that we are not doing badly,” said Mr Ibrahim.

He said the government would have a delegation that would visit Southern Borno to carry out automated processes in Hawul, Biu, Kwaya-Kusar, Bayo and Shani LGAs.

“We believe our IGR will increase tremendously by God’s grace in 2025,” he said.

Mr Ibrahim said that ahead of the 2025 revenue target, the service had a week ago signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with a service consultant.

He said the MoU was on service level agreement on the collection of revenue from grains and cattle markets through the same automated system.

“We instructed our technical partners to integrate them (consultant), open an account for them, give them revenue heads, and identify the revenue heads that they will collect.

“So this is how we intend to cover the gap that has been identified in our revenue collection in order to meet our projected IGR in 2025,” the chairman said.

(NAN)