The Voluntary Assets and Income Declaration Scheme has collected data of over five million corporate organisations and individuals in the country.

This was disclosed in a statement issued by the VAIDS Office in the Federal Ministry of Finance on Wednesday.

According to the statement, data collected will be subjected to further analysis to ensure that all unpaid taxes are tracked and collected.

The office also stated that the second phase of its data mining initiative was aimed at obtaining data from all government revenue-generating agencies such as the Federal Inland Revenue Service, Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, Central Bank of Nigeria, Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria, Federal Housing Authority, Petroleum Technology Development Fund and the Nigerian Communications Commission.

Data harvested from these agencies, the VAIDS office explained, would be used to determine the companies that had not remitted taxes based on income earned, those that had under-declared, and government agencies and corporate organisations that had collected taxes on behalf of the government but had failed to remit such.

Last month, the data collection efforts of the VAIDS office received a boost when the governments of Lagos, Osun and Kaduna states as well as the Federal Capital Territory Administration volunteered to provide all transaction data required to identify tax defaulters at the expiry of the first phase of the tax amnesty programme on March 31, 2018.

States that provide the required information were expected to experience steep jump in their Internally Generated Revenue, as analyses of data by the VAIDS office would lead to considerable recovery of lost revenues and provide a rich data capture of eligible taxpayers, the statement said.

Earlier, the VAIDS office had obtained data on all contracts and transactions above N50m from the Nigeria Customs Service, Asset Management Corporation of Nigeria and the Nigeria Export-Import Bank, among other sources.

Data collected are being matched with those that will be provided by the FIRS, Corporate Affairs Commission and the Government Integrated Financial and Management Information System to identify tax-defaulting companies.