Secret Reporters No place to hide
Secret Reporters
As Nigeria’s economy dwindle under the watchful eye of Muhammadu Buhari, one man who has continued to contribute to the downfall of our resources is Bola Tinubu’s protégé, Babatunde Fowler, who is Chairman, Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) has continued to better his pocket, with backing from his untouchable godfather that has been acclaimed as the force behind President Muhamadu Buhari’s victory in the last general election.
Secret Reporters gathered that since Fowler became the FIRS boss, FIRS quarterly collection has never gone above 50%. The worst record ever in the history of FIRS. He has also abandoned and destroyed the already working structure in FIRS put in place by his predecessors who were more qualified and experienced than him.
Our findings reveal that, Fowler has been issuing out appointment letters to his cronies and has also made Directors and Senior Staff redundant at the various needless regional training schools created by him and went ahead to recruit as far as new staff into directorate cadre of less than 10 years post undergraduate experience, yet the many senior staff with better experience due for promotions to the directorate levels have been denied, claiming lack of vacancies.
Afraid that, Directors in FIRS are more knowledgeable than him, Fowler has shelved this directors deliberately because he got intimidated and inferior bossing them, which led to Fowler suspending the Director of LTO Mr Ohaguwa, a well respected and intelligent Director-one of the brains behind the successes of FIRS over the years for just doing his job.
Fowler had questioned why a Director should query a taxpayer, who happens to be his brother.
One of our sources who spoke with our medium said, “Officers in FIRS issues query letters to tax payers talk less of a Director.”
In a bid to defraud the Government, and put money into his pocket, there have been series of secret recruitments against the standards of FIRS and Federal Character Commission, but in defiant, Fowler camped his recruits at Merrit hotel for a 2-day induction exercise paying N500,000 per recruit of over 500 inductees as a hotel bill, which rose to N250 million, as it has never been the practice of FIRS nor any government MDA to lodge inductees in a hotel on such bills.
Not done with his personal recruitment of staff in FIRS, Fowler bribed the National Assembly members and other Executive members including the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, (SGF), Vice presidents, with job slots of Officers I & II while himself and Tinubu brought senior officers and directors.
“There are concerns from sources, that Fowler instead of concentrating on how to raise more tax revenue to the Nation since assuming office has been busy trying to get hold of FIRS and make merchandise out of it.” Sources said.
Fowler in his bid to make more cash for himself, decided to contract out the supply of diesel and management of FIRS power source to his cronies thereby taking the job of the facility department the sole manager of FIRS power and infrastructure, leaving FIRS to face power crises Nationwide.
Fowler stopped sending “AIE” or Imprest to the field officesand went further to bring his Oba to the Revenue House to warn and threaten FIRS Directors, “ to desist from reporting his son to the President else he will send them to the lagoon.”
