THE National Association of Resident Doctors (NARD) has called on the Federal Government to exempt its members from the recently introduced Personal Income Tax Act (PITA), stressing that their call duty, hazard and teaching allowances were being taxed for no just cause.
NARD also urged the Ministry of Health to take urgent action to recommence overseas clinical training for resident doctors.
Government, a few months ago, reintroduced the overseas component of the residency programme for doctors. This followed the report of the Rowland Ndoma-Egba Committee inaugurated in 2010 to review the residency programme in Nigeria. One of the terms of reference of the committee was to examine the one year clinical attachment/training abroad for resident doctors.
At the Ministry of Health on Tuesday, the resident doctors expressed concern that the scheme was taking long in recommencing. They also expressed worry over what they called diminishing relativity in wages among doctors and health workers, urging that the wages of workers be calculated based on length and rigours of training, work hours, exposure to hazards and degrees of scarcity of skills, in line with international best practices.
Led by the NARD National President, Dr. Lawal Akindele, the group told the Minister of Health, Prof. Onyebuchi Chukwu: "The implementation of the new Personal Income Tax Act has been generating a lot of unrest in our health institutions. This is because the call duty, hazard and teaching allowances are now being taxed."
NARD added: "We humbly request that the call duty, hazard and teaching allowances for doctors be exempted from taxation. We will also like to make reference to some issues that border on residency training and thus are germane when discussing healthcare delivery in Nigeria.
"The residency training committee report earlier submitted in April 2010 revisited the issue of overseas clinical training for doctors, which it also strongly recommended. This mandatory overseas training would satisfy the prescribed exposure and criteria for college examination."
The body spoke further: "Another area of concern for NARD is the diminishing relativity in wages among doctors and other health workers. Over the years, there had been different scales for remuneration of health workers.
"But the worst appears to be consolidated salary, which lumped together all health workers under the same scale irrespective of the fact that there are doctors, medical laboratory scientists, nurses, accountants and administrators, among others, in the hospital environment."
However, on the association's demand on tax, Chukwu said that tax issues were outside his mandate, stating: "It is not the mandate of the Ministry of Health to decide taxation issues.
"We do have the Federal Inland Revenue Service and the Joint Tax Board. I believe this matter can be properly discussed with the agencies. If the tax is too high, government will cue into it."
