The Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry (LCCI) has called on the Nigeria Revenue Service (NRS) to  extend its deadline for  the filing of Company Income Tax,  fixed for June 30, this year.

 

The Chamber made the appeal in a statement issued, recently,  by its Director General, Dr. Chinyere Almona.

 

It argued that  while it would not shield businesses from blame, for waiting till the last minute of the deadline, such businesses should, however, be reconsidered, since hitches were experienced while  carrying out the exercise  in the agency’s newly-launched Rev360 portal, on the last day.

 

It added that the NRS’s tax platform, launched about two months ago, suffered prolonged downtime on June  30, the  statutory CIT filing deadline, leaving thousands of companies unable to file with hours to spare.

 

“This is a platform failure, not a taxpayer failure. We also understand that such a new system launched too close to a hard deadline can develop teething problems especially due toa peak-day traffic.

 

“ In addition to that, a predictable last-minute volume has exposed its lack of capacity, producing login failures, validation errors, and failed submissions precisely when businesses needed reliability most,” it stated.

 

Besides calling for the extension of the CIT filing deadline by one month, the Chamber also urged NRS to waive all penalties for companies that attempted to file on or before June 30 but were blocked by the outage; and urgently stabilize Rev360’s capacity before the next filing deadline.

 

The Chamber also urged the agency to announce the extension and penalty waiver as soon as possible to avoid apprehension and confusion in the business community.

 

“In the spirit of implementing the new tax system with a cautious regulatory approach, the Chamber considers an extension of the deadline a necessity at this time,” it added.