E-invoicing: FIRS warns taxpayers against hiding transactions

The Federal Inland Revenue Service has warned taxpayers against falling for the temptation to hide transactions with the going live of the new National E-Invoicing Solution (Merchant-Buyer Model), as transaction monitoring has become easier.

This piece of advice was given to a gathering of large taxpayers in Lagos during the just-concluded two-day post-launch workshop.

The National E-Invoicing Solution (Merchant-Buyer Model) is a digital representation of transactions between suppliers and buyers, effectively replacing traditional paper or electronic documents such as invoices, credit notes and debit notes. This eInvoice includes all essential transaction details like supplier and buyer information, item descriptions, quantities, prices, tax, and total amounts. Designed to facilitate real-time or near-real-time validation and storage of transactions.

Speaking at the workshop, the Acting Director of Tax Automation at FIRS, Mike Adoga, said, “FIRS is in the middle of providing, you know, governance and ensuring that every invoice gets a reference number, which is also part of this initiative, because what we do at the Tax Automation department of FIRS is we provide all the digital tools that would make the process of tax administration seamless.

One of the other things with the initiatives we have is transaction monitoring. Now, if you’re tempted as a taxpayer not to declare all your invoices on the invoicing platform, that won’t be a very good idea, because we have also given all the payment gateways the responsibility of reporting every payment that passes through them to us. That’s an incentive to use the invoicing system fully.”

Mr Emmanuel Eze, who represented the Chief of Staff to the FIRS Executive Chairman, Tayo Koleosho, said the workshop was designed to provide practical guidance on taxpayer enablement, integration processes and return invoice transmission.