Pricewaterhouse Coopers (PWC) has ranked Nigeria 170th out of 189th countries on its 2014 Global Ease of Paying Taxes report.
With the ranking, Nigeria just did better than 19 countries globally in terms of measuring all the mandatory taxes and contributions that a medium-sized company must pay in a given year.
Presenting the report in Lagos on Wednesday, the head of Tax and Corporate Advisory Services at PWC Nigeria, Mr. Taiwo Oyedele, pointed out that the performance did not speak well of Nigeria “especially as it seeks to become one of the top 20 countries globally by the year 2020” .
The paying taxes index is one of the eleven indicators that the World Bank uses in determining its ease of doing business globally.
The report looks at tax systems from the business perspective and considers all of the taxes and contributions that a case study company (a small to medium sized domestic company) pays and generates, the authors said on Tuesday.
It also uses three indicators, total tax rate, making payments and compliance time to provide data on tax systems in 189 economies around the world.
Mr. Oyedele, head of tax and corporate advisory services, PwC Nigeria, noted that Nigeria, using the case study company had a total tax rate of 33.8 per cent.
In terms of the total tax rate index, Nigeria performed better than the rest of the world which had an average of 43.1 per cent as well as Africa at 52.9 per cent.
It, however, performed poorly on the second index -the number of tax payments, where the country makes 47 different payments.
The world average total tax payments is 26.7 per cent while for Africa, it is 36.1. This places Nigeria far more than world average and also higher than the Africa average.
This performance, according to Oyedele, reflects the issues of multiple taxation, where presently, entities are made to pay too many taxes at both local, state and federal levels, all trying to raise revenue without due consideration of the impact of all these on the tax payer.