Finance Act, 2021 Summary And Commentaries On The New Provisions

Introduction

On 31 December, 2021, President Muhammadu Buhari signed the Finance Bill, 2021 (now Finance Act, 2021) into law. The Finance Act, 2021 (the Act), which was signed into law alongside the 2022 Appropriation Bill, introduces significant changes to a number of tax and regulatory laws in Nigeria in response to the continuing negative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the economy and the current recession.

At the end of the second millennium, the Finance (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act No.30 of 1999 was passed to revise certain provisions of the Nigerian tax laws. Since then, the use of this avenue for legislative review had not been deployed despite the prevalence of redundant and anti-business provisions that continued to exist in our tax laws. However, President Muhammadu Buhari remarkably signed into law the Finance Act, 2019 two decades later to revise certain redundant and anti-business provisions that existed in our tax laws. In a similar vein, the