Workers, guests stranded as Enugu seals hotels over tax evasion
The Enugu State Internal Revenue Service has sealed some hotels for tax evasion in compliance with an order obtained from the High Court in Enugu on November 29 to seal the businesses.
It was, however, learnt that guests and workers of some of the hotels in Enugu were locked in by officials of the agency who were on a revenue drive on Friday.
The Enugu State Government, through the ESIRS, approached the court seeking an order restraining the respondents for failure to pay their staff members’ pay-as-you-earn tax, development levy, and companies withholding tax due to the state government from 2015 to 2020 for some, and 2018 to 2021 for others.
It was a similar situation in other affected hotels as only guests without cars were allowed to leave through the back gates of some of the hotels, while the main gates were shut.
Taxi drivers who had gone to pick up their clients also had their vehicles locked in by the enforcement team.
However, addressing journalists shortly after the exercise, the Chairman of the Enugu State Internal Revenue Service, Ekene Nnamani, said after a tax audit, it was discovered that many institutions had not been meeting their tax obligations for the past seven years.
Nnamani added, “We even served them the intention to sue them in court and when those things failed, we instituted a case against them in our courts, after the court had heard our applications, they rejected some asking us to go and do more work on them, and then granted us an order for 16 corporate entities who had failed to comply with the tax laws.
