The Lagos State government is targeting not less than 600 billion Naira as Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) in the 2018 fiscal year.

The Supervising Commissioner for Economic Planning and Budget, Mr Akinyemi Ashade says the state aims to achieve this feat through the widening of the tax net and improvement in reforms to enhance revenue generation systems.

Addressing journalists on the activities of his ministry in the last one year, Mr Ashade said “the State have been able to shore-up its IGR from about N25 billion in 2016 to N30 billion in this year’s budget.”

He stressed that this became a reality through prudent management of available resources.

“During the period under review, we were also able to manage the economy of the State with the available resources to ensure that our desire to meet our revenue projections of N30bn monthly in 2017 and N50bn monthly in 2018 through improvement on the various reforms is achieved. The reforms aimed at improving revenue collections in various revenue agencies such as Lands, Physical Planning through complete implementation of Electronic-Geographic Information System, e-GIS and the continuous enumeration of properties for efficient collection of Land Use Charge,” he explained.

Budget size
The Commissioner said that Lagos State Government was also targeting over one trillion Naira budget size in 2018, a threshold that no other State in the country had reached.

On the performance of year 2016 budget, Mr Ashade stated that it stood at 80 percent, saying that the audit process to determine the budget performance for the first quarter of year 2017 was being finalised.

“The Year 2016 budget was N662.588bn with total revenue of N542.874 and a deficit financing of N119.715bn. I am pleased to inform you that as at December 31, 2016 it performed at 80%. The total revenue on the other hand closed at N436.328bn/80% while Total Internally Generated Revenue was N312.830bn/75%.”

“Our total Revenue recorded in first quarter of the year performed at 77% as against 75% in Q1 2016 due to implementation of Central Billing System and multi-channels revenue payment. Overall, the internally generated revenue performed at 82% for first quarter of 2017, we are currently finalising the audit of the first Quarter (Q1) performance and further breakdown will be made available after the process is concluded,” he reiterated.

‘MDGs to SDGs’
Mr Ashade said that during the period under review, the Ministry had successfully transited from Millennium Development Goals, MDGs into Sustainable Development Goals, SDGs, through counterpart funding towards the completion of healthcare facilities and proper expenditure of the conditional grants scheme totalling N1.2 billion.

According to him, “the Ministry supervised the renovation and inauguration of 14 Primary Healthcare Centres located across the state under the Year 2015 conditional Grants Scheme at a total cost of N1.2bn. The Lagos State government contributed N600 million as counterpart funding towards the completion of the Primary Healthcare Centres. This scheme was borne out of the Debt Relief Gain granted to Nigeria by Paris Club and associated Nations in Year 2006.”