Photo Credit: The Nation
2025-12-24 06:12:00
Reporting by The Nation indicates the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) is pushing a unified identity approach for taxation—where individuals’ NIN and companies’ CAC registration numbers function as the primary tax identifiers.
The change is positioned as a cleanup of Nigeria’s fragmented tax identity ecosystem—multiple identifiers, inconsistent databases, and loopholes that make compliance tracking and enforcement harder.
By linking tax identity to the national identity system and corporate registry, authorities say they can reduce duplication, improve taxpayer coverage, and make it harder to “disappear” across systems.
For individuals and businesses, the biggest shift is conceptual: you’re expected to treat your NIN/CAC number as your tax identity anchor, with tax records mapped to that single ID across agencies.
The Guardian quoted FIRS: “For individuals, your NIN automatically serves as your Tax ID… You do not need a physical card,” and Channels TV echoed the same clarification: “You do not need a physical card; the Tax ID is a unique number linked directly to your identity.”
Echotitbits take: This can either tighten compliance or widen mistrust, depending on how transparently it’s implemented. Watch for data-protection safeguards, dispute-resolution for wrong linkages, and whether state tax authorities harmonise—or keep parallel systems that recreate confusion.
Source: The Nation — December 23, 2025 (https://thenationonlineng.net/nin-becomes-automatic-tax-id/)
The Nation 2025-12-23
