As the deadline for Nigeria’s electronic invoicing mandate ends today, the country’s largest corporations are discovering that adopting the technology is the easy part. Data quality, disjointed internal processes, and uncertainty over compliance requirements are emerging as the true compliance bottlenecks.

The new tax regime requires companies generating at least N5 billion in annual turnover to transmit invoices in real-time through the National Revenue Service’s Merchant Buyer Solution (MBS), enabling the government to tighten compliance and plug historic revenue leaks. While some large taxpayers are already transmitting invoices through the platform, others are still completing integration, testing, and validation ahead of the deadline.

For early adopters, the friction starts at the baseline of data entry.

“We went live before the deadline, and the integration has been seamless so far,” said Dapo Adeyemi, an ERP applications manager.

Despite the smooth rollout, Adeyemi said businesses are beginning to encounter operational challenges like customer data mismatches, which are triggering constant system rejections.

“The reality on the ground is that there is still some misalignment between the old Tax Identification Number (TIN) and the new Tax ID,” he said.

“There are cases where we receive a customer’s TIN, and when we transmit the invoice, it gets rejected because of the mismatch. We then have to go back to the customer to validate the information. Since the NRS allows only a 24-hour window to…