BY JOHNMARK UKOKO
Few days after the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) announced its e-invoicing policy regime on Nigeria’s internal trade process, a leading economist has said that the apex bank got it wrong.
Chief Executive Officer of the Centre for the Promotion of Private Enterprise (CPPE) and immediate past Director-General of the Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry (LCCI), Dr. Muda Yusuf, therefore, urged the CBN to rejig the policy or scrap it totally.
Yusuf said the policy would further worsen the challenges businesses in the country.
“The e-invoicing and e- evaluator policy will only worsen an already bad international trade transactions process. The CBN introduced the e-valuation and e-invoicing to curb foreign exchange malpractices.”
He noted that the policy would increase transaction cost, entrench red tape, increase uncertainty, escalate business disruptions, weaken investors’ confidence and heighten corruption risk in the system.
“The truth is that there is a strong correlation between red tape and corruption. The increasing incursion of the CBN into the trade policy is an aberration in our economic management system and serious cause for concern to the business community.
“Issues of import valuation and classification are statutory functions of the Nigeria Customs Service (NCS), with the Finance Ministry as their supervising organ. The decision of the CBN to now undertake valuation and product price benchmarking of imports and exports is a duplication of the statutory responsibility of the Nigeria
Customs Service.
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He also argued that it would create an additional regulatory compliance burden and costs for the business community, adding: “We, therefore, submit that the CBN reversed the e-evaluation and e-invoicing initiatives, because there is no justification for the new policy.”
