Dike Onwuamaeze
The Nigeria Revenue Service (NRS) has said that the introduction of electronic invoicing would improve tax compliance, reduce leakages and enhance transparency in Nigeria’s tax administration system.
The Project Lead, NRS E-Invoicing Project, Mr Mohammed Bawa, said this at the DigiTax E-Invoicing Compliance Breakfast Session held in Lagos on Tuesday.
The event was organised by DigiTax, an NRS-accredited e-invoicing platform, as part of efforts to support the NRS’s ongoing education and sensitisation campaign around the e-invoicing mandate.
Bawa said that the initiative aligned with global trends in tax digitisation and would help Nigeria improve its tax to GDP ratio, which remained among the lowest in Africa.
According to him, the system would provide the NRS with better visibility into transactions across sectors and help formalise activities within the informal economy.
He said that e-invoicing would standardise invoice formats nationwide using globally recognised invoice schemas and improve efficiency for businesses and tax authorities.
Bawa said that the initiative would also support the NRS transition from manual and electronic tax administration processes to a fully automated system to system interaction model.
He noted that the legal framework for implementation was provided under the Nigeria Tax Administration Act, which prescribed penalties for non-compliance.
According to him, the NRS has completed the on-boarding phase for large taxpayers and is preparing to enforce compliance among defaulting entities.
Bawa said medium taxpayers were expected to begin compliance in the third quarter of 2026, while on-boarding of emerging taxpayers would commence in 2027.
He said that the NRS is targeting full adoption of e-invoicing by all taxpayers by the end of 2028.
Bawa urged taxpayers yet to on-board to begin the process and work with accredited service providers to achieve compliance.
Also speaking, Country Director, DigiTax Nigeria, Mr Olumide Akinsola, said that businesses should look beyond their own systems and assess the compliance status of their suppliers and counterparties.
Akinsola said that a business whose suppliers were not transmitting invoices through the MBS platform risked being unable to claim VAT input credits on those transactions.
He said this supply chain exposure represented a significant commercial risk that many businesses had yet to quantify.
Akinsola also launched the DigiTax’s whitepaper titled “The State of E-Invoicing Readiness in Nigeria” that examined compliance adoption trends and the readiness gap across taxpayer segments.
He said that DigiTax is operating across Nigeria, Kenya, Zambia and the United Arab Emirates, adding that lessons from those markets have shown that businesses which integrated early avoided the disruption that typically accompanied enforcement deadlines.
The IT Project Manager, D’Accubin Solutions, Mr. Alexander Ogunsina, said that Nigeria’s e-invoicing framework had been built on international standards including PEPPOL, BIS 3.0 and UBL 2.1.
Ogunsina said that the framework’s alignment with global standards meant Nigerian invoices were compatible with international trade requirements.
