The House of Representatives Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has directed Guaranty Trust Bank (GTB) to calculate and remit to the federal government recovery account, the Value Added Tax (VAT) on the commission it received from Remita from 2015 to 2022.

The Chairman of the Committee, Rep. Bamidele Salam, gave the directive in a ruling at the resumed investigative hearing investigation into alleged revenue leakages through REMITA platform and non-compliance with standard operating procedure and other allied service agreements on Thursday.

The committee raised two issues on evidence of remittance of VAT components of Remita collections and collection of fees in the first regime of the Remita transaction.

GTBank, Keystone, Zenith Bank, Sterling Bank, Polaris Bank, FCMB, Ecobank and Wema appeared before the committee on Thursday.

In his submission, the Executive Director of GTB, Ahmed Liman, informed the committee that, the bank didn’t remit the VAT for the period of 8 years.

He said, “We believe that Remita is saddled with the responsibility of sharing the commission fees between the payment receiving parties. In our mind, we think Remita has done the needful before sharing the fees between the parties.”

While responding to the second issue on the collection of fees in the first regime of the Remita transaction, he said that the bank charges 0.75 per cent on all the payers who used the Remita platform.

The Executive Director added that the bank received N254,489,013 from the Accountant General through Remita in 2018.

After his submission, the committee ordered Guarranty Trust Bank to calculate and remit the Value Added Tax (VAT) on the commission fees received from the platform from 2015 to 2022 to the federal government recovery accounts domiciled with the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN).

Other Banks that appeared before the committee on the same issues were referred to the reconciliation sub-committee in order to address the discrepancies that were noted and reconcile ahead of their next appearance before the committee.  (Daily Trust)