Daramola Joseph Omoyele

New UK tax residents who enter the tax system through Pay-As-You-Earn employment may assume that payroll withholding settles their full obligations, leaving overseas income, including rental receipts, business distributions, and foreign investment returns, undeclared for several years until HMRC detects the discrepancy through intelligence or international data exchange. This paper introduces the Disclosure Timing Gap: the structural interval between the moment a worldwide income obligation first arises for a new UK resident and the moment any administrative mechanism clearly signals that it exists. To close that gap, the paper proposes the Residency Tax Orientation Statement (RTOS), a brief yes-or-no orientation check embedded within HMRC's digital onboarding pathway, including GOV.UK One Login for new individual customers, directing users to existing guidance on overseas income obligations without creating liability, requiring asset disclosure, or triggering enforcement action. Drawing on policy design scholarship, behavioural tax compliance theory, and published HMRC administrative data, the paper develops an evaluation framework for testing whether such an intervention could reduce delayed disclosure and multi-year compliance enquiries. The analysis suggests that a low-cost, well-timed entry-stage prompt within existing digital infrastructure represents a proportionate and testable response to a foreseeable administrative design failure. This paper is a policy design analysis and does not provide individual tax advice; the RTOS proposal would require legal, operational, and data protection review before implementation.

Religion occupies a central position in the social, political, and cultural life of Sub-Saharan Africa. While existing scholarship has examined its moral authority, social capital, and political influence, its economic role remains marginal in mainstream development analysis. This paper reconceptualises religious institutions as economic institutions that mobilise resources, accumulate capital, shape labour relations, and influence household and national development outcomes. Drawing on political economy and institutional economics, the study introduces the Religious Economic Complex (REC) framework, which explains how faith, trust, and cultural legitimacy are transformed into sustained economic power. Using a mixed-methods approach combining household survey data (N ≈ 45,000), cross-country development indicators, and qualitative case studies from Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and South Africa, the paper demonstrates that religious institutions operate as quasi-market actors largely outside formal regulatory oversight. The findings indicate that religious economic activity is associated with significant opportunity costs for households and is linked to long-term development trajectories, particularly industrialisation and productive investment. By repositioning religion at the centre of economic analysis, the paper contributes a novel institutional perspective to development studies and highlights the importance of incorporating religious economic activity into development frameworks.

A practical handbook explaining tax compliance procedures for small and medium-sized enterprises in Nigeria, including handling tax queries, audits, assessments, objections, and dispute resolution. The book is aimed at business owners, accountants, and startups navigating Nigeria's complex tax environment, providing a step-by-step guide to engaging with the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) and state revenue authorities.

Inflation remains a persistent macroeconomic challenge in Sub-Saharan Africa, where monetary policy transmission is often weakened by shallow financial systems, fiscal dominance, exchange rate pass-through, and limited central bank credibility. This paper examines how monetary and institutional conditions are associated with inflation outcomes across 31 Sub-Saharan African economies between 1995 and 2022. It proposes a Monetary Transmission Capacity Framework, which argues that monetary policy effectiveness depends partly on financial depth and central bank credibility. Using a complete-case panel of 434 country-year observations, the paper estimates fixed-effects models with Driscoll-Kraay standard errors to account for cross-sectional dependence, heteroskedasticity, and serial correlation. The results show that money supply growth and exchange-rate depreciation are positively associated with inflation, while financial depth, central bank independence and fiscal balance are negatively associated with inflation. A lagged The squared inflation term provides evidence consistent with non-linear inflation persistence. The findings suggest that inflation management in Sub-Saharan Africa depends not only on monetary policy stance but also on the structural and institutional capacity through which policy is transmitted. The results should be interpreted as conditional associations rather than causal estimates, given potential endogeneity between inflation, monetary aggregates, and institutional variables.

A practical guide to HMRC's Making Tax Digital for Income Tax Self Assessment (MTD-ITSA) regime, written for self-employed workers, landlords, and their professional advisers. From April 2026, self-employed workers and landlords with gross qualifying income above £50,000 are required to maintain digital records and submit quarterly updates to HMRC using approved software. The book covers: the distinction between quarterly updates and tax returns; scope and threshold calculations; the full MTD compliance year including quarterly submissions and year-end adjustments; common income and expense recording errors; software misclassification risks across QuickBooks, FreeAgent, and Xero; legitimate expense claims frequently under-claimed; capital allowances and year-end adjustments; compliance risk signals and HMRC's Connect system; record-keeping templates; and a thirty-day action plan for the first quarterly deadline. The book draws on HMRC's published administrative data, including the Measuring Tax Gaps 2025 report, and situates MTD within the broader context of UK tax gap reduction policy.

Nigeria’s economic growth remains constrained by the nonlinear and evolving interplay between insecurity and macroeconomic instability. Using annual data from 1980–2020, this study employs a NARDL framework and wavelet coherence analysis to uncover asymmetric and time-frequency effects. Findings reveal a stable long-run relationship in which insecurity and inflation significantly hinder growth, while reductions in insecurity yield weaker gains. Wavelet results show persistent bidirectional causality between growth, insecurity, and inflation.

This study examines the impact of foreign direct investment on economic growth in Sub Saharan African countries using a Panel Autoregressive Distributed Lag (P-ARDL) model. We employ this method due to its flexibility in accommodating both stationary and non-stationary time series, as well as series with mixed integration orders. The findings indicate that, despite varied short-term impacts, foreign direct investment, human capital, and GDP per capita have substantial long term effects on economic growth in the region. These findings contribute to the debate on FDI’s role in tackling widespread poverty and high unemployment challenges.

A practitioner-focused book analysing HMRC's risk-based compliance approach, explaining the behavioural, financial, and data-driven indicators that place UK small and medium-sized enterprises on HMRC's investigation radar. The book draws on knowledge of tax administration, compliance analytics, and regulatory behaviour to equip business owners and their advisers with practical intelligence for navigating HMRC scrutiny, including self-assessment errors, VAT discrepancies, and Making Tax Digital compliance gaps.

The United Kingdom–Nigeria migration corridor has expanded substantially since 2021, generating significant public and policy debate in both countries. Existing scholarship tends to evaluate the economic impact of this migration at a single point in time, focusing either on labour market contributions, tuition fee income, or remittance outflows without integrating these flows into a coherent temporal account. This article addresses that gap by proposing and applying a migration lifecycle framework to Nigerian entrants to the United Kingdom via study and work routes between 2021 and 2025. Drawing on human capital theory, the New Economics of Labour Migration, and balance of payments analysis, the framework identifies three analytically distinct stages: an entry stage characterised by substantial upfront inflows to the UK through tuition fees, visa charges, and the Immigration Health Surcharge; a transition stage in which migrants move from study to employment via the Graduate and Skilled Worker routes; and a settlement stage characterised by sustained remittance outflows to Nigeria. Integrating quantitative data from HESA, the Home Office, the ONS, the OECD, and the World Bank with published secondary sources, the article demonstrates that the UK is a net fiscal beneficiary of this corridor across the full lifecycle, while Nigeria bears formation costs that remittances only partially and indirectly compensate. The article further identifies a recursive dynamic in which settlement-stage remittances finance the education of subsequent migrant cohorts, rendering the corridor self-reproducing. Policy implications are drawn for both the United Kingdom's immigration framework and Nigeria's diaspora engagement strategy.

This paper revisits the relationship between health expenditure and life expectancy by distinguishing between cross-country moderation patterns and within-country temporal evidence. Using cross-sectional data for 111 countries in 2019 alongside two-way fixed effects panel models covering 2010–2019 with one-year lagged covariates, the study examines whether adult literacy and electricity access moderate the health expenditure–longevity association. In cross-sectional data, the association between health expenditure and life expectancy is more pronounced in countries with higher literacy and greater electricity access, consistent with a complementarity hypothesis. These interaction patterns are not recovered with statistical precision in within-country fixed effects models. Adult literacy and electricity access remain positively associated with within-country changes in life expectancy, but the health expenditure coefficient is imprecise in the panel setting, reflecting limited within-country annual variation in spending after absorbing country fixed effects. The findings are more consistent with a structural and long-run interpretation of these complementarities than with a short-run within-country dynamic, while also highlighting the limits of short-panel identification for slow-moving national characteristics.

Capital flight remains a pervasive constraint on economic development in Nigeria, yet the dominant literature has concentrated on its determinants and magnitude rather than its internal structural consequences. This paper examines the developmental consequences of capital flight through an Economic Linkages Framework, an original conceptual architecture that synthesises Hirschman’s (1958) backward and forward linkage theory, Keynesian multiplier analysis, and endogenous growth theory to explain how capital flight disrupts the processes through which domestic investment generates compounding economic value. The framework distinguishes two structural pathways: positive economic linkages when capital is retained, and negative economic linkages when capital exits, producing weakened aggregate demand and structural fragmentation.

This policy note proposes a Residency Tax Orientation Statement (RTOS), a short early-guidance mechanism delivered when new UK tax residents first create a Government Gateway account. A recurring compliance pattern shows that individuals entering the UK tax system through PAYE employment often assume employer withholding satisfies all obligations. As a result, overseas income such as rental income, business profits, and foreign investment returns frequently remains undeclared for several years. HMRC typically becomes aware of such income only after multiple tax years have passed, resulting in retrospective assessments, interest, and penalties. The RTOS introduces a brief orientation check asking whether individuals receive common forms of overseas income. Where relevant, the system routes users to the appropriate HMRC guidance without creating tax liability, asset disclosure, or enforcement triggers. By providing guidance at the first interaction with HMRC's digital services, the RTOS aims to reduce delayed disclosure, improve taxpayer understanding of worldwide income rules, and lower the number of costly multi-year investigations. The proposal demonstrates how a low-cost behavioural intervention within existing digital infrastructure could strengthen preventative compliance in the UK tax system.

The United Kingdom has committed to achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, with carbon pricing positioned as a central policy instrument. However, recent emissions outcomes reveal a pronounced asymmetry: sectors covered by emissions trading have achieved substantial reductions, while non-ETS sectors accounting for around 75% of territorial emissions have shown limited progress. Using verified UK ETS emissions data (2021–2024), this paper shows that the effectiveness of carbon pricing is closely constrained by features of policy architecture, including limited sectoral coverage, fragmented fiscal incentives, and structural inconsistencies in energy taxation.

Digital tax reforms that increase reporting frequency alter not only the reporting frequency of taxpayers but also the behavioural conditions that produce compliance information. This paper introduces behavioural reporting noise (BRN), defined as systematic distortions of reported compliance signals generated by adaptation to a reporting regime rather than underlying noncompliance. Using MTD-ITSA as a motivating example, the paper develops a theoretical framework around three mechanisms: compressed categorisation under deadline pressure, precautionary underclaiming under uncertainty, and misalignment between quarterly submissions and annual declarations.

This paper examines how small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the United Kingdom encounter automated decision-making and profiling through routine business software such as payroll, recruitment, and payment systems. Using qualitative regulatory analysis and practitioner observation, it evaluates the operational application of Article 22 of the UK GDPR and identifies compliance gaps created by vendor opacity, limited audit visibility, and the absence of structured human review processes. The paper proposes proportionate compliance tools, vendor accountability expectations, and practical review procedures to improve transparency, accountability, and protection of data subject rights.

This book examines the institutional role of religion in Nigeria and its relationship to governance, accountability, and social justice. Drawing on political economy and institutional analysis, it interrogates whether organized religion in Sub-Saharan Africa fulfils its social contract, or whether the absence of accountability mechanisms within religious institutions undermines broader civic values. The work situates religious institutions within frameworks of public-interest governance and economic development.

Nigeria maintains multiple parallel identification systems, including the NIN, BVN, voter registration, and SIM registration, each operating without shared infrastructure. Drawing on qualitative comparative institutional analysis, this paper examines how this fragmented architecture affects administrative reach and state capacity. The analysis finds that parallel registries produce systematic verification inconsistencies, raise transaction costs, constrain financial inclusion, and generate enforcement gaps that weaken service delivery and regulatory effectiveness.

This paper investigates the impact of bureaucratic hurdles, particularly the Permanent Voter Card (PVC) collection process and polling unit re-distribution, on voter turnout in Nigeria's 2023 general election. Using sub-national data, it argues that these administrative bottlenecks functioned as de facto barriers to political agency, disproportionately affecting vulnerable demographics and contributing to the historically low turnout observed in the 2023 polls. The study provides recommendations for institutional reforms to enhance the inclusivity of Nigeria's electoral infrastructure.