By Alex Uangbaoje 

The Kaduna State Internal Revenue Service (KADIRS) has partnered with the Tax Justice and Governance Platform (TJ&GP)  to review the roles of the Grievance Redress Mechanism (GRM).

This follows KADIRS’s inauguration of GRM, an institutional tool that enables effective tracking of taxpayer grievances and ensures corrective measures are taken where necessary.

During the meeting, the newly inaugurated 8-man GRM committee deliberated on tracking and recording all complaints and grievances received from taxpayers.

Kaduna State Coordinator of TJ&GP, Simeon Olatunde, while congratulating the Committee, noted that setting up the committee was a response by the Chairman to their many advocacies.

He said, “It’s one of the best practices across the globe that if you want to identify a functional administration or system, there must be room to hear the concerns of the people.

“I’m here today with my team to also look at the Score card or the tool that we’re using to monitor our progress and to make sure that we document some of the concerns that taxpayers will bring.

“This is a step towards a bigger picture that we are looking at. We want to get to a point whereby besides this tool, we want to have a website that customer can be anywhere in the world and call you and say, I’m not in Nigeria and i want to go to complain about a service.”

Richard Bature, a member of the committee, noted that the meeting was timely and important to the organisation, noting that the review has exposed members of the committee to grievance management on tax-related issues.

“Every day, the taxpayers have one complaint or the other either in terms of assessment that we serve on them, or they are being harassed, or they are having issues with people in the system.

“So from here, we are going to do better in terms of attending to issues raised by the taxpayers to improve our revenue drive in the State”, Bature said.