As businesses gear up for the coming year, it’s only normal for the focus to be on increasing profits but there are other matters that should be on the radar if uninterrupted progress is to be made for the good of the company.
Against the backdrop of dwindling foreign reserves and accruing national debt, the federal government is seeking avenues to enforce existing laws as a means to generate higher internal income.
The greater implementation of policy reforms in a bid to plug fiscal sinkholes, analysts say, will, for the first quarter of 2015, be at the crux of public administrative projects especially as new leaders will assume their elective posts next year.
And this is just the beginning.
Stiffer measures for acquiring loans from financial institutions as well as larger requirements for the welfare of personnel as a result of the economic unrest besotting the nation are other matters that will stay under the microscope.
As a result, experts in payroll distillation, human resource and management solutions, say it is important for organisations to be aware of the legislative issues that could affect their operations in the months to come.
To help enterprise concerns prepare for the New Year, BD SUNDAY has identified the top regulatory issues businesses should be mindful of. They include:
• Health care: While the President, Goodluck Jonathan declared the Universal Health Coverage open at the last general summit held in Abuja in March 2014, he declared and reaffirmed health as a fundamental human right and insisted that health insurance be made mandatory.
With less than 70 percent of the existing population covered by a good health insurance plan, the federal and state governments have instructed the National Health Insurance Scheme to intensify its internal reforms and embark on high-level campaigns to draw people into the scheme, especially through the organisations they work with.
• Increased taxation: On concluding a stakeholder forum in July 2014, the Transfer Pricing (TP) Division of the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) issued letters to tax consultants impressing that the profit returns filled by most of their clients were inadequate and out of synch with the monitored revenues these organisations had accrued.
Also with stakeholders calling for an increase in taxes as a means to grow its fiscal quota to be used in creating alternative sources of funding for national projects, experts say that once these postulations are adopted, companies will spend more money paying taxes.
• Retirement: Pension Reform Act 2014 was signed into law on the 1st of July, 2014, thereby repealing the Pension Reform Act of 2004. As a result, important modifications were made and they include an increase in the base contributions employers and employees must make to the scheme and the imposition of stiffer penalties and fines on Pension Fund Administrators upon failure to meet their commitments.
This invariably means that harder sanctions will be meted out to companies who fall short of ensuring that their organisations put the pension welfare of their work force on their priority list.
• Privacy and data security: The recent drive for the personal data accumulation of its citizen by the Federal Government has led to the National Identification Management Commission to begin processes such as the launching of the national e-ID card and by extension the Bank Verification Number exercise.
The good news is that as these projects reach completion stages, fraudulent employers and employees will be caught with a fair amount of ease, however, more investments will need to be made in shielding human resource data from abuse especially as no solid Data Protection and Privacy law exists at the moment.
• Banking: Following the last meeting held by the Monetary Policy Committee, cosy interest rates are out the door. From this moment until oil prices stabilize, the economy is diversified and subsidy is probably removed, loans gotten from the banks that are willing to lend will have a 13 percent minimum compulsory interest rate attached to it. This is the new norm owing to the continued devaluation of the naira against the dollar as well as erratic inflation rates.
Rita Ohai
