Wonders are many, and none is more wonderful than man, so said Sophocles, Athenian dramatist. In the same manner, French author, Emile Zolo propounded that if you shut up truth and bury it underground, it will but grow and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through, it will blow up everything in its way.
Nigerians are transfixed in shock as events unfold in the macabre drama playing out with respect to the office of Governor of Abia State. On Monday June 27, a Federal High Court presided over by the Hon. Justice OkonAbang, purported to sack the sitting Governor of Abia State on the grounds that he did not collect his tax receipts for 2011, 2012 and 2013 as and when due.
The offence of Ikpeazu, according to the Federal High Court Judge, was that he waited until 2014 when he needed the tax receipts to apply for them. When officials of the Abia State Board of Internal Revenue acted on Ikpeazu’s request therefore, they wrote the receipts for the three years in question on the same day and from the same booklet being used to write taxes for 2014. This same practice affects most civil and public servants in Nigeria, this writer inclusive. It is common knowledge that most of those who ask for their tax clearance certificates regularly are contractors and other business men and women who require them for transactions.
For emphasis, Okezie Victor Ikpeazu paid his taxes for 2011, 2012 and 2013 as and when due; it was the receipts for the taxes which were written in 2014. On this ground, Justice Abang accused the governor of fraud and declared his seat vacant. This is unprecedented in the electoral history of Nigeria. In the annals of conspiracies to unlawfully and illegally rob an elected official of a victory he won at the polls in Nigeria, this tops it; this qualifies as the heist of the century.
When F.N. Nwosu who scored five votes and Uchechukwu Samson Ogah who scored 103 votes to Ikpeazu’s 487 votes at the PDP primaries in 2014 went to court on issues bordering on tax documents, no one took the two cases seriously, for many reasons. First, is that it is impossible for Dr.Ikpeazu not to have paid his taxes for the years in question when he was an employee of the Abia State Passengers Integrated Manifest Scheme (ASPIMS) and later the Abia State Environmental Protection Agency (ASEPA) where he was General Manager and Deputy General Manager respectively. He was a civil/public servant for those years. As such he was a PAYEE (Pay As You Earn Employee). PAYEEs are a special breed. They pay their taxes every month as they receive their salaries unlike many others who pay yearly; even that is not entirely accurate. It is more accurate to say that their taxes are deducted and remitted to the tax authorities automatically every month even before they see their salaries, in fact, they have no choice in the matter. They are not responsible for the assessment, deduction or remittance of their taxes. They only get to know what they pay as taxes when they receive their pay-slips and look at the column where it has been deducted.
When it comes to paying taxes, payees are the salt of the earth as they are the most compliant. No payee is given his receipts for taxes paid every month it is deducted, neither is it given at the end of every tax year which ends on December 31 of each year. Some payees spend all their years in employment, which in the case of civil servants is 35 years, without once seeing their tax receipts.
Many never have need of it and never apply to the tax authorities for it. But if they need their tax receipts for any reasons, they then apply to the tax authorities who will call for their records from the appropriate agencies and from those records, compute and generate the figures which will now be entered in a receipt and given to the payee. The payee has no role, contribution or input in this process. He has no input in the deduction and remittance of his taxes, so the records also do not have his input nor are they in his possession.
When the tax authorities call for the records and extract what they want from it in order to write his receipts, he is also not involved or even present. The role of a payee in the matter of tax receipts are only two: (1) to apply to tax authorities for it and (2) to collect it when it is ready. That is all Ikpeazu did in this instance and yet he is accused of forging a document he did not make.
The strategy of calling a dog a bad name in order to hang it in Nigeria, is most unfortunate and regrettable. Once a public official is accused of forgery, no matter how unfounded and without merit the accusation is, people go to town shouting “forgery”; majority do not pause, take a breath and examine the allegations to determine its merit. Most citizens are just too anxious to believe the very worst for their elected officials and are not ready to afford them any benefit of doubts whatsoever. In this case, Ikpeazu is accused of making false entries in a document he was not even present when it was made. The Abia State Board of Internal Revenue (BIR) which wrote the receipts, signed, sealed it and delivered to Ikpeazu, deposed to an affidavit through its officials, explaining the process and procedures followed by them but the honourable judge ignored them. The process of writing tax receipts is not rocket science and even common sense, which no longer seems to be quite so common these days, makes it easy to understand that the allegations against Ikpeazu are at best spurious, unfounded and entirely without merit.
For instance, his traducers complain about the receipts for his taxes in 2011, 2012 and 2013 because they were “all paid” in 2014 and the serial numbers on the receipts show they are from the same booklet. They said the receipt for 2013 was written before that for 2012 was written. They equally said that in one of the receipts, December 31 of that year fell on a Saturday, a non-working day. Another claim was that for 2011 when he started his employment with ASPIMS mid-year, he paid more taxes than his six months’ salary for that year could account for. That they called fraud. They also blamed it on Ikpeazu. This amounts to sheer ignorance. If a tax official is writing tax receipts for taxes already paid in previous years, he will write it on the booklet for the current year starting from where he stopped for the last receipt written. He will not start looking for booklets used in previous years. He does not need to write them serially or in any order.
The receipts for three years or even 20 years of tax already paid previously can be issued in one day and does not amount to fraud. Every tax year ends on December 31 and is so denoted on tax receipts; the fact that for any one year, December 31 ends on a Saturday or Sunday is moot. With respect to 2011, when Ikpeazu was under PAYEE for only six months, the tax officials will also take into account his earnings for the previous six months when he was not yet in the employment of ASPIMS to determine his assessable income for the ENTIRE year; the tax paid by Ikpeazu in 2011 was for his earnings for the whole of that year not only for the six months he was a PAYEE, so, to say that he paid more tax than his income for six months could accommodate sounds unreasonable.
Ikpeazu deserves high commendation for surrendering tax that accrued to government from private incomes he made before he joined government employment contrary to most other people who would have denied earning anything at all during the said period. Tax receipts are issued for a year and not in fractions of a year or monthly. A tax official who is writing tax receipts does not know and would not care anyway what the receipts are being used for: whether for purpose of elections, Land Registry transactions, or just for the mere records of the tax payer, etc; he will merely follow established tax protocols. How any perceived error in the actions of a tax official, assuming for purposes of arguments, there exists any, can be blamed on the tax payer really beats the imagination. In this particular case, it is unprecedented for a sitting governor to be accused of forgery and fraud in respect of a document he did not make, had no input into its contents and on this contrived and trumped up grounds, invalidated his election.
This is a clear assault on our collective national efforts towards achieving egalitarianism and respect for the will of the people in electing their leaders. Nigerians should be worried. Every sane mind and lover of peace, should rise up and resist this attempt by some fraudulent people to set our hard earned democracy ablaze.
- Comrade Iwuoha, is the Commissioner for Information, Culture & Strategy, Abia State.
