By Epiphanus Obia
Four other states restore access without explanation or relief for affected taxpayers.
Two of Nigeria’s most consequential tax states have formally extended their personal income tax filing deadlines following portal failures that ITPulse documented on Tuesday, but Abia State has issued no such relief, and its revenue portal remains non-functional, 14 hours after the deadline.
The Lagos State Internal Revenue Service confirmed an extension to 14th April 2026, with Executive Chairman Ayodele Subair acknowledging the technical disruptions that had rendered the eTax portal inaccessible to thousands of taxpayers ahead of the March 31 statutory deadline.
The FCT Internal Revenue Service has gone further, pushing its filing deadline to 30th April 2026, giving Abuja-based taxpayers an entire additional month to complete their returns.
Both agencies have maintained that the statutory deadline under Nigerian tax law remains 31st March each year, and that the extensions are practical adjustments to the compliance window rather than changes to the legal framework. Failure to file by the new dates will still attract penalties under the Nigeria Tax Administration Act 2025.
ITPulse’s original audit, conducted between 11:30 a.m. and 1:05 p.m. on Tuesday, 31st March, found six state revenue portals entirely inaccessible on the statutory deadline day.
Lagos returned a dual error ERR_SSL_PROTOCOL_ERROR and Error Code 522.
Kaduna, Ondo, and Oyo each returned ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT.
Plateau produced a DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN error, indicating a domain-level failure.
All five portals have since been restored without any of the four non-Lagos states issuing public statements on the outages, their causes, or whether affected taxpayers will face penalties for filing failures that were beyond their control.
Abia presents a different and more troubling picture. The state’s portal (abiairs.gov.ng) has returned the same result across every access attempt since Tuesday, the page loads briefly before turning entirely white, rendering it non-functional.
Unlike the hard error codes recorded for the five fully inaccessible states, Abia’s failure creates a surface appearance of availability. The Abia State Internal Revenue Service has not acknowledged the outage, communicated any deadline extension, or provided taxpayers with any alternative pathway to compliance.
The extensions from Lagos and Abuja establish a clear precedent for how revenue authorities are expected to respond when digital infrastructure failure prevents lawful compliance.
This story updates ITPulse’s reports of 31st March and 1st April 2026 on the state revenue portal failures recorded on the statutory tax filing deadline.