By Hajara Leman
The Gombe Internal Revenue Service generated N8.4 billion as Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) in 2020.
Malam Abubakar Tata, Chairman of the service, said this in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Gombe on Saturday.
According to him, since the creation of the state in 1996, it is the first time of generating such revenue, in spite of the Coronavirus pandemic.
He attributed the development to the encouragement and the motivation given to the staff of the service by Gov. Inuwa Yahaya.
Giving further account of his one year stewardship, Tata said when he came on board in February 2020, he found out there were only six directorates in the board and he created additional ones for optimum service.
He mentioned that the last time members of staff of the service were trained was in 2013.
Tata noted that he organised trainings within and outside the state to build the capacity of over 120 staff, as a tool to enable better performance in cash collection.
He explained that before he became the chairman, members of staff were not being motivated, as there was no link between the Gombe Internal Revenue Service and other internal revenue services in the country.
The chairman said they were just operating in silos with no correspondence and no platform to exchange ideas to enable them to know what others were doing.
Tata said there were lots of leakages and lack of cooperation between the service and other revenue generating Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs)
”When I assumed duty I came with the mindset that we were going to change the story by understanding and diagnosing the problem and in doing so, we could proffer a solution.,” he said.
The chairman said that he invited 78 MDAs who were generating revenue for the state and had a discussion with them as well as invited the remaining MDAs that were not generating revenue.
According to him, I went ahead to find out what their prospects were and what they did to the state.
He said they then created one or two revenue heads in a bid to start generating revenue to assist the government.
Tata noted that he also improved the allowances of members of staff by giving them 75 per cent of their basic salary.
“Also end of year bonus for staff and other departmental awards for best performing staff were introduced to motivate the staff, which in turn will discourage them from corrupt practices,” he said. (NAN)
