Fair Tax Monitor (FTM)- CISLAC This grant contributes to the outcomes of Oxfam Novib’s Financial Systems and Investments UNIT.

More specifically, as part of our F4A PW4 work we will work together with CISLAC in Nigeria and we will support them to undertake Fair Tax Monitor Researchand advocacy.

The Fair Tax Monitor (FTM) project was started in December 2014. The FTM project was developed by Oxfam Novib and Tax Justice Network–Africa in collaboration with partners and Oxfam Country Offices. The Fair Tax Monitor’s overall goal isto strengthen the advocacy activities at the local and global levels. Through the development of local technical capacity on technical fiscal issues, it provides an overview of national tax systems and identifies the main challenges they face. The tool provides reliable evidence for theadvocacy for progressivity of tax administration in the country, and strengthens the position of partners and increases their credibility as well as their influencing power. Furthermore, the FTM compares key elements of taxsystems and thus complements the activities of Oxfam’s global Even it Up! campaign realized at the National level. The project’s focus is on tax policies and practices, andby deliberate choice it pays only reserved attention to issues related to public expenditure.

With the dwindling revenues and unstable fiscal landscape of the country occasioned by corruption and further worsened by the pandemic and continued resort to taxation as the means of funding development and with admitted low tax to GDP ratio, increasing poverty and inequality and fight against corruption and the persistent dominance of the informal economy in the face of efforts to diversify the sources of revenue, further emphasizing the place of taxation and in the light of the SDGs withrenewed emphasis on financing for development in countries like Nigeria, it has become timely to conduct a follow-up research to the baseline of 2018.

This to identify trends and socio-economic policyinterface and establish what changes have occurredand why, to provide data and information with which civil society can engage to promote the design, implementation and monitoring and evaluation of tax policies and the tax system to promote fair taxation that mobilizes funds for development and effectively plays the roles of re-distribution, representation and re-pricing while addressing the prevalent problems of poverty and inequality, which underlie to tax justice campaign.

In Nigeria, with the fate of revenues from the extractive sector, the emphasis of maximizing tax revenues and internally generated revenues; The incessant rise in our debt profile; unstable economic landscape and consequently less resources available to fund the budget and the demands of the sustainable development goals has seen the government making frantic efforts to generate more tax by increasing the tax base, enlarging the tax netsand considering the raising of the tax rate for indirect taxes such as VAT. This accounts for taxation in the informal economy remaining distorted with high incidences of evasion and underpayments on one hand, coinciding with rampant cases of heavy burdens arising from multiple taxes, levies and rates, on the other. Meanwhile, social services, poor infrastructure, poverty, inequality and failureofsmall enterprises remain pervasive. Having undertaken advocacy after the initial research in 2018, considering the corresponding changes in tax policies and practices and at the juncture of a renewed government efforts to raise additional revenue throughthe tax system, another research on the status of the tax system and its ability to increase tax yield without exacerbating poverty and inequality, is necessary and timely.