WORD-FOR-WORD: What Taiwo Oyedele said about Tax laws at 2026 Economic Outlook (Video)

Taiwo Oyedele, Chairman, Presidential Tax Reform Committee, was one of the keynote speakers at the 2026 Economic Outlook organised by the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria (ICAN).

The programme with theme: ‘ICAN@60: Accountability as the Bedrock for National Development’, held in Lagos.

Oyedele spoke about the new tax laws, alleged alteration, role of the National Assembly, among others.

To set the records straight, Daily Trust has reproduced the video and text of the part of Oyedele’s speech that was used for the story: “FG pauses on tax laws guidelines, cites uncertainty”.

His exact words have been reproduced below:

When people said there were alterations in the law and I said I just hope that someone, somewhere with the right authority will use the opportunity of these allegations of alteration to the tax law to look for the fire and put it out rather than chasing the smoke. Three Senior Advocates of Nigeria, including a former NBA president, said to me that there are three versions of the constitution. You know, so this is a problem with the process. Quality assurance, accountability, let’s fix it.

For the people online, one question is, these 500,000 rents, how is it going to be administered? Would it be automatically for all employees? Would it be based on the pay structure if you have rent allowance there? Or would it be that you need to bring receipts? The idea behind this 500,000 I already explained to you is for the urban poor, but we couldn’t discriminate because that would be unconstitutional, so everybody can claim it. How it will be claimed so that the process is not too cumbersome is still being worked out with the Joint Revenue Board. We have some drafts, we haven’t finalized, which goes into the last question that says, would all revenue collection be consolidated under NRS? The answer is yes, but that process has only just started. And then the question is, they haven’t even issued all these guidelines. That is true. Our plan in an ideal world was for all these regulations, guidelines, public notices to be ready like three months before December because we wanted to give their feedback, debate it, finalize and gazette. But in our real world, it did not happen like that. And as I speak to you today, we have more than 40 regulations, guidelines and public notices that have been finalized. But we can’t release a single one of them because we’re still waiting for what is the final version of the gazette. You know why? Because the Acts Authentication Act says whatever the government printer publishes is the evidence of the law that was passed. That government printer published something which we shared and we said, ‘this is the official version.’ Lawmakers said it’s not what they passed. So, they said they would do their own gazettes. They set up their committee; they did their own review. They did their own gazette. They sent me a copy, soft copy. But that’s not what the Acts Authentication Act says. So, I sent my staff, go to government printer and go and buy. They went there as of last week. They said it’s not ready. That they should wait. So, I also told everybody, the NRS, GRB, you should wait because we can’t issue guidelines where we are not 100% certain that this is the final official position. I called my staff this morning. I said, go back there. Be following up every day. ‘Go, go there. Don’t call them. Go and sit down there.’ And I got feedback as I was here that says that, I don’t even know whether I should say this or not because I don’t know what the press will report. But in the interest of accountability, and transparency… So, my staff told me that they said, everything that they printed, the National Assembly collected from them and said they shouldn’t sell to anyone. That they want to complete their review. While that is good, it also creates uncertainty again. So, in other words, what I would say to you is, the explanation we have provided about the law, because all this issue of they’ve altered, they’ve not altered. It’s not even a lot. There are few items that shouldn’t affect the main thing that people need to… It’s nothing about the tax rate, about the tax burden, the filing deadline. But this is the best I can say to you as we speak. Hopefully, we can get over this soon than later. Thank you very much.

Watch the video here.

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