The Joint Revenue Board Act may streamline tax coordination and strengthen taxpayer complaint handling. But its sweeping confidentiality rules, disclosure penalties, and information control architecture raise questions that go far beyond tax administration. KEHINDE ADEGOKE writes.
Nigeria’s new Joint Revenue Board Act has been sold to the public as a landmark reform — a long-overdue restructuring of tax administration designed to harmonise revenue governance, improve dispute resolution, and strengthen taxpayer protection.
A closer reading of the law suggests something more complicated.
Beneath the efficiency language lies a sweeping consolidation of institutional power, unusually strong secrecy provisions, and disclosure penalties that could weaken public oversight precisely where public oversight matters most — in the machinery that determines who pays what, how disputes are settled, and how revenue flows through the federation.
The Architecture of Secrecy
At the centre of the law is the Joint Revenue Board — a new coordinating body comprising the heads of the Nigeria Revenue Service, state internal revenue services, the Federal Capital Territory Internal Revenue Service, and several federal agencies. On paper, the framework is designed to reduce friction among tax authorities, resolve residency disputes, improve data sharing, and create a more uniform revenue administration system across the country.
That sounds like efficiency. But the law also gives the new structure the power to operate behind a veil of confidentiality.
Sections dealing with internal memoranda, communications, documents, and institutional information impose strict secrecy obligations on officials. Unauthorised disclosure is criminalised — with penalties that include fines and prison terms. Officials handling documents and information under the Act are required to treat them as secret and confidential.
For a system designed to regulate the tax affairs of businesses, workers, and citizens across a country of 242 million people, this raises an uncomfortable question: how much of the public’s business is being pushed out of public view?
The FOIA Conflict
This is where the tension with transparency becomes sharp — and legally significant.
The Freedom of Information Act was designed to strengthen citizen access to government-held records and improve accountability across all federal institutions. The Joint Revenue Board Act appears to create a parallel culture of secrecy around revenue administration — covering data exchange, policy coordination, and institutional decision-making.
If the Act’s confidentiality clauses are interpreted aggressively — as broad regulatory language routinely is by institutions that prefer opacity — they could be used to deny access to records that would ordinarily be available for public scrutiny under the FOIA.
That is not a minor concern. Tax policy shapes the lives of every Nigerian — who pays what, how disputes are handled, how revenue is shared between the federation and states, and how exemptions or waivers are granted. When the machinery behind those decisions is insulated by broad secrecy provisions, public oversight becomes harder. Independent reporting becomes harder. And accountability becomes a privilege of those with institutional access rather than a right of those who fund the system.
The Power Concentration Question
The Board’s mandate extends well beyond coordination. It is tasked with integrating taxpayer identification data, resolving disputes between tax authorities, advising on double taxation matters, maintaining revenue data platforms, publishing tax statistics, and recommending reforms to the National Assembly.
This makes the Board a central node in Nigeria’s entire revenue system — a position of extraordinary informational power. In the wrong hands, or without adequate independent checks, that kind of information control can become a tool of political leverage rather than administrative efficiency.
The Tax Appeal Tribunal created by the Act is another element that demands scrutiny. Designed to settle disputes arising from national and state tax laws, it could help streamline adjudication and reduce the burden on courts. But the appointment structure raises independence concerns. The Minister appoints tribunal commissioners, zonal secretaries, and other staff. The tribunal is funded through the Consolidated Revenue Fund.
In principle, those arrangements may be standard. In practice — particularly where politically sensitive tax disputes involving connected individuals or major corporations are at stake — they raise legitimate questions about whether the tribunal can rule freely against the interests of those who appointed and fund it.
The Tax Ombud: Promise and Limitation
The most genuinely promising reform in the Act is the Office of the Tax Ombud — a complaint mechanism designed to give taxpayers a formal route to challenge arbitrary conduct, administrative errors, and unfair treatment by tax authorities.
The Ombud can mediate complaints, inspect premises, examine persons with relevant information, and report systemic issues directly to the National Assembly. On paper, it is a meaningful accountability instrument — precisely the kind of independent check that Nigeria’s tax administration has lacked.
But even this office is not fully insulated from the structural problem the Act creates. The Ombud is appointed by the President on the recommendation of the Minister. Its staff and operations are tied to the ministerial and budgetary architecture of the government.
The question is not whether the office exists. The question is whether it can function freely and fearlessly when the larger law it operates within favours confidentiality, control, and official discretion over transparency and public access.
The Funding Question Nobody Is Asking
A provision buried in the Act’s financial design deserves attention that it has not yet received.
The Board may accept gifts, loans, grants, aid, endowments, and voluntary contributions. It may also borrow funds with approval from the National Economic Council.
On the surface, those are standard public finance provisions. But in a system built around secrecy, they raise specific accountability questions that the Act does not answer. Who gives these gifts? Under what conditions? Are there disclosure requirements for donors? Could voluntary contributions from corporate interests become a backdoor channel of influence over a body that controls tax data for the entire country?
The Act does not say. And because of the confidentiality provisions, the public may never find out.
The Transition Window
The passage from the old Joint Tax Board framework to the new structure is another area that deserves systematic scrutiny. The Act contains savings and transitional provisions that transfer rights, obligations, assets, liabilities, and ongoing matters from the previous system to the new one.
Transition periods in regulatory reform are historically where the most consequential details hide — staff redeployments, unresolved liabilities, procurement carryovers, administrative discontinuities, and institutional turf battles that reshape the new structure before it has formally begun.
TheDiggerNews.com is examining the transition provisions and will report on their implementation as the Board becomes operational.
Efficiency or Control?
The deeper story behind the Joint Revenue Board Act is not simply that Nigeria is modernising its tax administration. It is that the country may be doing so in a way that simultaneously centralises information, narrows public disclosure, and strengthens institutional control — while presenting all of it as reform.
That is a familiar pattern in regulatory architecture: efficiency is promised on the surface while accountability is quietly reduced beneath it.
For a law that speaks the language of harmonisation and taxpayer rights, the secrecy provisions are striking in their scope. Narrow operational confidentiality — protecting taxpayer data, shielding specific audit processes, preserving the integrity of active investigations — is legitimate and necessary. Every serious tax authority in the world maintains it.
But when secrecy becomes broad enough to cover internal communications, institutional documents, policy coordination, and key administrative decisions, it stops being a tool of operational integrity and starts being a tool of governance opacity.
That is the line this Act may have crossed. And whether it has crossed it will ultimately be determined not by the law’s drafters — but by how the institutions it creates choose to use the powers it gives them.
The Questions That Must Be Answered
TheDiggerNews.com is formally putting three accountability demands on the public record:
One — The Federal Ministry of Finance and the Joint Revenue Board Secretariat must publish a plain-language guide to which categories of information will be treated as confidential under the Act, and which will remain accessible to citizens under the Freedom of Information Act.
Two — The National Assembly’s committees on finance and on information must conduct a formal compatibility review of the Joint Revenue Board Act’s confidentiality provisions against the Freedom of Information Act, and publish their findings.
Three — The Office of the Tax Ombud, once established, must publish an annual transparency report detailing complaints received, outcomes achieved, and systemic issues identified — without redaction for reasons of institutional convenience.
The Dig
Nigeria’s tax system needs reform. That is not in dispute. Fragmentation, duplication, and administrative chaos have cost the country revenue and investor confidence for decades.
But reform that centralises power without strengthening accountability is not modernisation. It is consolidation wearing the language of efficiency.
The Joint Revenue Board Act may well deliver the coordination improvements it promises. Or it may deliver something else entirely — a revenue governance architecture in which the information that matters most to citizens, businesses, and journalists is classified as confidential by default and released only at institutional discretion.
The final question is political as much as legal: will the new regime deepen public trust in Nigeria’s tax administration — or deepen the suspicion that revenue governance is being placed beyond public reach?
That question is now before lawmakers, civil society, taxpayers, and the press.
TheDiggerNews.com will keep asking it until it is answered.
TheDiggerNews.com is seeking an audience with the Federal Ministry of Finance, the Joint Revenue Board Secretariat, and the National Assembly’s Committees on Finance and Information. Responses will be published in full upon receipt. This investigation is ongoing.
𝐊𝐞𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐝𝐞 𝐀𝐝𝐞𝐠𝐨𝐤𝐞 𝐢𝐬 𝐚𝐧 𝐚𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐝-𝐰𝐢𝐧𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐢𝐧𝐯𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐠𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐣𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐭 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐧 𝟏𝟓 𝐲𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐝𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐮𝐢𝐬𝐡𝐞𝐝 𝐞𝐱𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐞𝐱𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐦𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐩𝐮𝐛𝐥𝐢𝐜 𝐝𝐢𝐬𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐬𝐞. 𝐖𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐭𝐡𝐫𝐞𝐞 𝐢𝐧𝐝𝐮𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐲 𝐧𝐨𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐝𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐞 𝐛𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐬, 𝐡𝐞 𝐡𝐚𝐬 𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐧𝐞𝐝 𝐫𝐞𝐜𝐨𝐠𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐟𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐥𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐫𝐞𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠, 𝐢𝐧𝐜𝐢𝐬𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐚𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐲𝐬𝐢𝐬, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐚 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐦𝐢𝐭𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐭𝐨 𝐚𝐜𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐭𝐚𝐛𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲. 𝐀𝐬 𝐌𝐚𝐧𝐚𝐠𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐄𝐝𝐢𝐭𝐨𝐫 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐂𝐄𝐎 𝐨𝐟 𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐃𝐢𝐠𝐠𝐞𝐫𝐍𝐞𝐰𝐬.𝐜𝐨𝐦, 𝐀𝐝𝐞𝐠𝐨𝐤𝐞 𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐬 𝐚 𝐩𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐞𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐧𝐞𝐰𝐬𝐫𝐨𝐨𝐦 𝐝𝐞𝐝𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐞𝐱𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐮𝐧𝐬𝐞𝐞𝐧 𝐭𝐫𝐮𝐭𝐡𝐬, 𝐚𝐦𝐩𝐥𝐢𝐟𝐲𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐠𝐢𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐞𝐝 𝐯𝐨𝐢𝐜𝐞𝐬, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐧𝐞𝐰 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐚𝐫𝐝𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐢𝐧𝐯𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐠𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐣𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐦.
𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐃𝐢𝐠𝐠𝐞𝐫𝐍𝐞𝐰𝐬.𝐜𝐨𝐦 | 𝐰𝐰𝐰.𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐝𝐢𝐠𝐠𝐞𝐫𝐧𝐞𝐰𝐬.𝐜𝐨𝐦 | 𝟎𝟖𝟎𝟑𝟗𝟏𝟑𝟓𝟒𝟕𝟐 | 𝐈𝐛𝐚𝐝𝐚𝐧, 𝐍𝐢𝐠𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐚
