NRS awards N5.75m to winners of tagline competition

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The Nigeria Revenue Service has awarded N5.75m in cash prizes to four winners of its staff tagline competition, which attracted 3,308 submissions from across the agency.

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The competition produced the NRS’ new tagline, “Inspiring Trust, Sustaining Growth”, unveiled in Abuja on Thursday.

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The winner received N2.5m, while the first runner-up got N1.5m. The second and third runners-up received N1m and N750,000, respectively.

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Speaking during the unveiling, the Group Director, Transformation and Strategy at the NRS, Alfred Okoh, said employees were invited on August 10 to suggest how the agency should be perceived, generating 3,308 submissions within six working days.

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“We were not looking for clever phrases. We were looking for words capable of carrying a national institution like ours. And importantly, we wanted those words to come from one of us,” he said.

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Okoh said the submissions were assessed for strategic alignment, originality, clarity and memorability. The entries were reduced from 3,308 to 112, then 85, before seven finalists were presented to a committee of tax controllers and management selected the top four.

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He explained that the new tagline reflected the transition from the Federal Inland Revenue Service to a broader revenue administration institution under the NRS.

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“We’re now a new revenue administration, and we’re not just talking taxes. So there are non-tax revenues that we are also accounting for with the new tax law,” Okoh said.

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According to him, the agency is moving away from a tax-focused identity towards broader revenue administration as it pursues reforms aimed at supporting the Federal Government’s $1tn economy target by 2030.

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Okoh further said the NRS being built must be “modern, integrated, technology-enabled, data-driven, and responsive,” but stressed that technology and branding alone would not transform revenue administration.

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“Transformation is not achieved by technology alone, nor by a new logo, nor by a powerful tagline,” he said.

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The Chief of Staff to the NRS Executive Chairman, Tayo Koleosho, said the agency expected to meet its revenue target for the year without increasing tax rates, citing improvements in tax administration and digitalisation.

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“The country is able to collect more revenue without raising the rate, by improving on the efficiency across the entire ecosystem,” Koleosho said.

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He identified electronic invoicing and the agency’s new digital tax payment system among initiatives intended to reduce the time businesses spend complying with their tax obligations.

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Koleosho added, “We are confident that at the end of the year, we’ll be able to meet the target as set for us by the government.”

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He said building taxpayers’ trust would also require ensuring that their data were protected, assessments were fair and collections were conducted professionally.

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“For increased revenue generation and collection, Nigerians need to trust the service,” he said, adding that the agency wanted to “tax the fruit, not the seed” by allowing businesses to grow alongside government revenue.

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On whether the NRS had sufficient internal capacity to execute 80 per cent of its operations without external consultants, Koleosho said the agency had already developed several projects internally.

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“Our new tax administration was designed and built entirely in-house. And the electronic invoicing is also another transformative idea that has been built in-house,” he said.

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According to him, the agency is implementing an “80/20 rule” under which 80 per cent of its work would be executed by employees, supported by training and skills development.

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The Executive Chairman of the NRS, Zacch Adedeji, had earlier reinforced the policy, saying, “80 per cent of the service job is going to be done by the service. No consultant here today.”

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The Director of Change Management at the NRS, Adenike Adegoke, said the tagline competition was deliberately structured as a collaborative exercise.

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“Our identity is not created at the top alone and just passed down. It is a collaborative effort, shaped and experienced, and expressed by every staff member of the Nigerian Revenue Service,” she said.

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