From Commitment to Effective Utilisation: Evaluating Nigeria’s Implementation of Tax Standards for Exchange of Information

Bala Dahiru Abdullahi is a Manager in the Tax Data Management Department of the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS), Nigeria. He holds a BSc and MSc in Economics from the Universities of Abuja and Ibadan (Nigeria), an MSc in Data Science and Analytics from the University of Nottingham, England, and a PhD in Econometrics from Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan. His research interests span revenue forecasting and tax policy analysis, financial econometrics, macroeconometrics, and tax data analytics. Dahiru has provided research and consultancy services to the African Tax Administration Forum, the African Development Bank, and the Centre for Management Development.

Bilal Hamza Imam is a Senior Tax Policy and Information Security Specialist at the Nigeria Revenue Service (NRS), working at the Exchange of Information Centre. With over 15 years of experience in tax administration, he specialises in international tax transparency, compliance risk management, and the operationalisation of cross-border information exchange frameworks. He played a central role in Nigeria’s implementation of the Common Reporting Standard (CRS) under the Automatic Exchange of Information (AEOI) in 2020, contributing to the design and deployment of the institutional and technological systems underpinning its rollout. He currently serves as Head of the Country-by-Country Reporting (CbCR) Unit, where he leads the exchange and effective use of cross-border tax information between multinational enterprise groups and Nigeria’s treaty partners. His work focuses on strengthening the practical impact of transparency frameworks, particularly on translating exchanged data into risk assessment, audit selection, and enforcement outcomes. His research interests lie at the intersection of international tax policy, governance, risk, and compliance, and the applied use of cross-border data in revenue administration, including revenue forecasting and data analytics.