The President and Chairman of Council, Chartered Institute of Taxation of Nigeria, Chief Cyril Ede, has said that part of the functions of the institute is to educate people on taxation. Ede said this during a tax forum for corporate and professional women with the theme, ‘Building a new Nigerian tax culture through women’ organised by the Society for Women in Taxation, an arm of the CITN in Lagos recently. He stated, “Taxation is a price we pay for a civilised society and we cannot go away from it, that is why CITN is devoting time to make sure that we encourage everybody to make the knowledge known so that it does not become a crime. We have been doing that to our children in schools as tax clubs. We are trying to catch them young.” The CITN president said the government should allow tax education to be part of knowledge in schools so that they could grow with the understanding of taxation. The first female President of CITN, Mrs Adebimpe Balogun, explained that what professional women were doing today could be compared with the case of Aba women riot. She stated, “In those days, our women were not enlightened enough to understand the role of taxation and they were so unfairly treated, because in those days, a woman could not do a number of things but to take care of her home, that was why the women fought against taxation those days.”

Source: Punch