Acting Director-General of the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC), Ms. Mary Uduk, at the weekend in Abuja urged relevant stakeholders in Light House Project aimed at boosting the Federal Government’s revenue profile in the face of rising needs.
The project was launched Friday by the Finance Minister, Mrs. Zainab Ahmed, who also chairs the technical committee, with membership drawn from revenue-generating government agencies, with the task of providing strategic direction for the Project; and serve as the source of the data required to populate the Project Lighthouse Platform. It will also assist the Ministry with relevant data/information on mining of information of taxpayers and revenue value chain; review of technical aspects of the Project and report on the progress of the project to relevant stakeholders (READ MORE).
Pledging cooperation to enable the Ministry to achieve its objective, Ms. Uduk while commending the Minister for the initiative, emphasizing the need for collaboration among relevant agencies to assist the government in its revenue generation.
Project Light House, he noted, is a positive step in that direction, giving the role of data and information in aiding the generation of more revenue, such that on the long run “all agencies will be better for it as there will be more resources for the government to carry out development.
She, therefore, pledged the commission’s full co-operation by making available all relevant data when needed by the committee.
“Data gathering and sharing is the way to go especially in this digital age, as when there is available data, information can be shared and that will increase compliance level as well as improve revenue generation,” she added.
Low revenue generation, the acting DG lamented, has remained a source of worry as to why the government does not meet its annual revenue projections, just as it will be difficult to provide critical infrastructure that will encourage investment in the country.
Speaking at the event, Minister of Finance, Mrs. Zainab Ahmed said one of the key economic policy objectives of the current administration, as contained in the Economic Recovery and Growth Plan, ERGP, is improving overall Federal Government revenues by targeting and increasing revenues from non-oil revenue sources.
She said the project also aims, among others, to increase the tax base by drastically increasing the Company Income Tax and Value Added Tax compliance, bringing additional taxpayers into the tax net, and increase Tax to GDP ratio from the current six percent to 15% by the year 2020.
Ahmed said that in the last few months, major steps have been taken to address the nation’s chronic revenue challenges, among which is the Strategic Revenue Growth Initiatives (SRGI), formulating policies and fiscal matters, preparing annual estimates of revenue and expenditure for the Federal Government among others.
According to Ahmed, “despite the fact that we live in a technology and data-centric world, we have not had a culture of using data and information to guide the formulation, implementation and impact assessment of our initiatives and policies
“This modus operandi presents a number of challenges. Firstly our policies are not usually empirically based, secondly, we are not able to effectively track implementation and impact of these policies and thirdly, we lack data to help guide the revision or optimization of these policies.
She said in response to the aforementioned challenges, the Federal Ministry of Finance initiated Project Lighthouse whose first phase involved mining of data from multiple sources to support the implementation of the Voluntary Assets and Income Declaration Scheme (VAIDS).
“Following the ratification of Project Lighthouse at the Federal Executive Council on Wednesday, May 9th, 2019, the Ministry of Finance is entering into a post-VAIDS or phase 2 of the project. However, Project Lighthouse is being positioned as a single source of truth for revenue and tax-related intelligence that will support the Ministry, its agencies, revenue agencies, tax authorities, and other stakeholders to be better positioned to address the revenue challenges we are facing” she said.
Ahmed said in this phase, Lighthouse will be using Big Data Analytics, data sciences and related technologies to gather and analyze financial data and revenue related data from multiple but related sources, while also using sophisticated data analysis tools to connect the dots between the different data sets.
All these she said is aimed at supporting the ministry to deliver on its statutory mandate, track the implementation of SRGI and other revenue initiatives, measure the impact of the ministry’s policies, programmes and initiatives, collect, analyze and share revenue related intelligence with its agencies and stakeholders, identify opportunities for new revenue streams across the public finance ecosystem as well as optimize existing revenue streams especially non-oil revenue.

Photo caption: Acting Director General, Securities and Exchange Commission, Ms. Mary Uduk in a chat with Dr. Mohammed Isa-Dutse, during the Inauguration of the Steering Committee of Project Lighthouse in Abuja, at the weekend.