By Epiphanus Obia
An audit conducted by this reporter on Tuesday found that at least six state revenue portals were completely inaccessible as millions of Nigerians faced the statutory deadline for filing their 2025 personal income tax returns, with Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital, among the states affected.
The checks, carried out between 11:30 a.m. and 1:05 p.m. on 31st March 2026, assessed all 36 state Internal Revenue Service (IRS) websites and the FCT portal, the only authorised channels through which taxpayers can file annual returns. The findings exposed a pattern of system failures that left a significant number of Nigerians unable to meet their legal obligations through no fault of their own.
Lagos recorded the most severe failure. Its eTax portal, etax.lirs.net, returned two distinct errors — ERR_SSL_PROTOCOL_ERROR and Error Code 522 — indicating a breakdown at the server level rather than a routine outage. This is particularly consequential as the Lagos State Internal Revenue Service (LIRS) administers Nigeria’s largest state-level tax base, covering salaried employees, self-employed individuals, business owners, and informal sector workers who have no alternative filing channel.
Kaduna, Ondo, and Oyo all returned ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT errors, meaning their portals failed to establish any connection with users attempting to access them. Plateau State’s portal presented the starkest failure of all, a DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN error, which indicates the domain itself could not be resolved, a problem that typically points to deeper infrastructure or configuration failures rather than temporary traffic overload.
As of the time this report was filed, none of the six affected states had issued any public statement acknowledging the outages, communicating alternative filing pathways, or indicating whether the March 31 deadline would be extended.
The silence is significant. Under Nigeria’s Tax Administration Act 2025, failure to file returns by the statutory deadline carries penalties including administrative fines and enforcement actions. The current situation places taxpayers in an impossible position, legally compelled to file, technically unable to do so, and without any official guidance on how that contradiction will be resolved.
Abia State presented a different category of failure. Its portal, abiairs.gov.ng, loaded briefly before turning and remaining white, non-functional across multiple access attempts throughout the audit window. Unlike the five states that returned hard error codes, Abia’s portal creates the illusion of availability while delivering nothing.
The audit found that 30 of the 37 portals reviewed were functional, with most providing at minimum a working homepage and accessible links. Several states demonstrated infrastructure maturity well beyond the national baseline. Anambra’s portal at tax.services.an.gov.ng featured a live customer care section and a calendar displaying upcoming filing deadlines. Ebonyi’s portal offered live chat. Enugu’s included a tax calculator, step-by-step filing guidance, and downloadable documents. These are important features as taxpayer’s anxiety runs high.
The contrast points to an unevenness in Nigeria’s digital tax infrastructure that the failures on Tuesday have thrown into sharp relief. Eighteen states recorded portals in full working order with features that actively support compliance. Eleven are working but almost bare of features. Five could not be reached at all. The remainder are somewhere in between, functional in the narrowest sense, but with user experience deficiencies that pose practical barriers to filing.
The broader implication is one that Nigerian digital infrastructure advocates have raised repeatedly but which rarely comes into focus. Platforms designed to compel compliance must themselves be reliable. When the state makes digital filing the sole pathway to meeting a legal obligation, it assumes a corresponding responsibility to ensure that pathway is open. On 31st March 2026, for taxpayers in Abia, Lagos, Kaduna, Ondo, Oyo, and Plateau, it was not.