The war against corruption in Nigeria: a new role for the FIRS?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the implications which the recent Federal Inland Revenue Service (Establishment) Act (FIRS Act), 2007 have for the ongoing war against corruption in Nigeria. Design/methodology/approach The paper examines the relevant provisions of the Act, which confers on the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) some anti‐corruption‐related powers. It discusses how the FIRS may benefit from the existing third‐party information regime under the Money Laundering (Prohibition) Act (MLA), 2004, and the amendments that should be made to the MLA to make the information regime under it serve the FIRS' purposes. Findings The paper points out that the main anti‐corruption‐related power conferred on the FIRS, to investigate the symmetry between taxpayers' lifestyles and their declared incomes, is similar to that conferred on the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission. It notes that declarations by certain categories of public officers to the Code of Conduct Bureau, which the Constitution (1999) contemplates, can provide the necessary base information for the FIRS in the discharge of its anti‐corruption‐related duties. Practical implications The paper discusses the desirable amendments to the MLA, 2004 that could make the third‐party information regime under the Act useful for the FIRS in the discharge of its anti‐corruption responsibilities. It also discusses how the taxpayer identification number, which the FIRS Act empowers the FIRS to issue, may be used as income tracker and thus play the type of role which the social insurance number or the social security number plays in Canada and the USA, respectively. Originality/value The paper explores the possibility of alternative, and equally potent, institution to prosecute the anti‐corruption war in Nigeria. It is the first to examine how the FIRS, which the newly enacted FIRS Act, 2007 creates, may serve as that alternative. It argues that the power to investigate the symmetry between taxpayers' lifestyles and incomes, which the FIRS Act confers on the FIRS, reinforces a claim that the Act concedes to the FIRS some anti‐corruption‐related responsibilities.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".