Consumption Tax, Double Taxation and the Taxes and Levies (Approved List for Collection) Act (Amendment) Order 2015: The Lingering Labyrinth
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Nigeria has a long history of legal conflict on fiscal federalism. One dimension borders on who has the power to tax the consumption of goods and services. Although the Nigerian Constitution prescribes how taxing powers are to be exercised between the federal government and the federating units, controversy remains as to the extent of taxing powers exercisable by each tier of government. This is because, apart from the Constitution, a peculiar military-era statute, the “Taxes and Levies Act” prescribes what taxes each tier of government can collect and appears to circumscribe their constitutional taxing powers. The federal government and the states have “fought” legal battles to determine who can tax what, without managing to obtain clarity in court. The continued agitation of some states to assert their taxing autonomy as regards consumption taxes led the federal government to alter the schedule to the above Act in 2015 to accommodate more taxing powers for states. The alteration seemed to ameliorate the long-standing conflict, but also raised concerns of double taxation among businesses. The validity of the alteration was successfully challenged in court by business owners, thereby reigniting the unending debate over whether states can tax consumption in Nigeria. This succinct article contributes to the literature on this aspect of Nigeria’s fiscal federalism debate. It argues that the recent decisions of the court have assuaged the concerns of double taxation, but they have not satisfactorily settled this fundamental issue of fiscal federalism.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| 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 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".