By Modupe Gbadeyanka
The federal government has invited manufacturers, importers, MDAs, NGOs and all other key industry stakeholders to a meeting to provide clarity on the revised Import Duty Exemption Certificate (IDEC) process.
A statement signed on Monday by the Director for Information and Public Relations in the Ministry of Finance, Mohammed Manga, said the event, slated for Tuesday, April 23, 2024, would be held virtually.
The statement said the IDEC process, which became effective on March 1, 2020, is a fiscal incentive by the federal government under the Ministry of Finance to boost sectors of the economy by exempting critical players from paying import duty and all other statutory customs charges.
It was stated that the Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister of the Economy, Mr Wale Edun, recently approved the inclusion of an Incentive Monitoring and Evaluation Platform (IMEP) in the IDEC process.
This was done to provide a framework to exclude and restrict ineligible applicants, enforce strict compliance to fiscal policy measures and provide a robust impact analysis of tax incentives on the economy.
It was to further eliminate the misuse of tax expenditures, support the delivery of economic outcomes from fiscal incentives. and strengthen the direct measurement of the impact of tax incentives on the economy.
According to Mr Edun, the inclusion of IMEP in the IDEC process “is to provide the Federal Ministry of Finance with a robust automated tool for more effective Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) measurement of the impact of all customs duty exemptions issued by the Ministry to government entities, companies, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and international organisations.”
The Minister noted that the ultimate aim of this revised IDEC process is to cut down on the cost of tax expenditure and ensure tax incentives which would positively impact the economy.
He listed the key features of the IMEP to comprise duty waiver claw back mechanism for issuance of demand notices to defaulters which would prevent misuse of issued incentive, e-report generation, a centralised database, factory geo-location tagging, industry qualification status validation, and inter-MDA integration.
However, he disclosed that at next Tuesday’s meeting, more clarity would be provided, noting that the link for the webinar will be published on the website of the Ministry of Finance, and on the IDEC’s YouTube channel.
Adedapo Adesanya