Why Section 14 Belongs on Every HR and Payroll Calendar

Section 14 of the Nigeria Tax Administration Act, 2025 isn’t a tax-team problem. It’s an HR and Payroll problem.

Here’s a practical example.

For example, at a mid-size Nigerian company, Ade got an offer letter with a monthly gross of ₦450,000.

Over two years, HR approved an increment in his transport allowance, the team in charge of payroll adjusted his housing component, and the finance team processed a one-off performance bonus.

Each department kept its own record correctly. No one cross-checked with each other.

When January came and the tax return required Ade’s total emoluments—allowances, benefits-in-kind, and net emoluments, total deduction, tax deducted and remitted as one reconciled figure, three departments produced three different versions of what Ade actually earned.

None of them matched the number Ade had been checking on his own payslip.

That’s not a tax problem, if nobody miscalculated a tax rate; it’s a data problem.

The underlying records were never aligned with each other, and the annual return is the first time something forces them to.

So what does Section 14 of the NTAA, 2025 actually require?

Every employer must file an annual return with the relevant tax authority on or before January 31 each year, covering all emoluments paid to employees in the preceding calendar year. That return isn’t a summary figure.

It has to disclose, per employee, gross emoluments, including allowances, benefits-in-kind, total deductions, net emoluments, and tax deducted. That’s not a number your payroll system produces on request in the last week of January.

That’s a number your payroll system has to have been keeping clean all year.

Then there’s the part most employers and employees overlook entirely: Section 14(3).

After the employer must have filed for all the emoluments to its employees, each employee is still required to file their own individual annual return. Employer’s filing doesn’t exempt your employees from theirs.

This is where HR and Payroll leads have an opportunity to educate their employees on what the law expects from them because most employees have never filed a personal return in their lives and don’t know where to start.

A monthly internal briefing discussing what’s required, what counts as income, and where to file, turns a compliance obligation into a moment of genuine value delivered to your workforce.

Another shift worth mentioning is digital filing.

State authorities like KWIRS and LIRS run their eTax platform on electronic submission—meaning no manual paperwork is accepted. If your payroll process still produces anything that needs inputting into a portal by hand, that’s a bottleneck you need to close before January, not during it.

And the cost of getting the date wrong is factual. Section 101 of the NTAA, 2025 sets an administrative penalty of ₦100,000 for the first month of default, and ₦50,000 for every month after that the default continues.

You can’t negotiate this fine, and it compounds while you’re still sorting out the paperwork.

Here’s what I’d say to any HR or Payroll lead reading this: January 31 doesn’t create a new problem. It exposes whichever one you already have.

If your payroll records, contracts, and filings were reconciled all year, the deadline is just a formality. If they weren’t, the deadline is where you find out in the worst possible way, with a penalty attached.

Build the reconciliation habit now. The deadline is just the day it gets tested.

This is exactly the kind of conversation we’re going deeper on at HR Power Circle on October 15 in Lagos. A curated room where compensation, retention, and compliance get discussed as one connected problem, not three separate departments.

If you are an HR leader, or you manage a finance and/or payroll team and want to get ahead of these challenges, I’d love to see you there.

Register here—https://bit.ly/hrpc7