The Taraba State Internal Revenue Service has said it improved internally generated revenue from N800 million to N1.6 billion since assumption of its new leadership in June 2024.

Chairman of the TSIRS, Brig. Gen. Jeremiah Faransa (retd), made the disclosure on Thursday in Jalingo, while speaking to journalists in his office on the activities of the service since he assumed office in June 2024.

Mr Faransa also noted that the IGR has risen from N10 billion in 2023 to over N11 billion as of September 2024.

He said that the service was expected to hit over N15 billion IGR when the October, November and December collections would be computed on its chat.

Mr Faransa attributed poor IGR to non-implementation of the Treasury Single Account, proliferation of revenue and security checkpoints, revenue linkages, analogue operations in collection of revenues and lack of training and retraining of the service’s staff among others.

The chairman however, said that he closed illegal revenue check points across the 16 local government areas of the state.

He noted that the state laws bordering on revenue collection only recognised the TSIRS as the only organisation with the responsibility of revenue collections.

He further stated that employees of the service had since embarked on training and retraining to engage in digital operations to harmonise activities of revenue collections in the state.

He said, “It is only in Taraba that you will discover multiple illegal checkpoints, we are not in a war zone where they mount multiple check points on the roads. The revenue collections were before now going into the pockets of some individuals, we have blocked the leakages, we have brought back revenue collections into the hands of the government and our IGR has significantly improved. Before I assumed office in June 2024, the state used to generate between N700 to N800 million, we are now generating over N1.6 Billion per month.

“From January to September, which is so far the last collection on our revenue central chart, we are having over N11 billion as against N10 billion for the whole of 2023. By the time we take the remaining three months of the year 2024, we should be hitting N15 billion, which is headway.  We must have to think outside the federation account, nobody can build Taraba for us, it is our responsibility and we have to support Governor Kefas to achieve his transformation agenda,” Mr Faransa stated. 

(NAN)