Nigeria's tax authority took its whole document archive offline. Its e-invoicing service got a redirect; the circulars did not
firs.gov.ng no longer answers. Not a 404, not a redirect: the connection times out. With it went the official address of 291 archived documents, among them the signed Finance Act 2020, the transfer pricing regulations and their gazette, and the public notices taxpayers and courts cite by URL. The same agency's e-invoicing subdomain was given a clean redirect to its successor on the same transition.
The Federal Inland Revenue Service became the Nigeria Revenue Service under the 2025 tax Acts. Renaming an agency and retiring its domain is ordinary administration. What happened to the documents is not.
We probed the old domain on 27 September 2026. firs.gov.ng and www.firs.gov.ng still resolve in DNS, to 66.22.96.124, but nothing answers on port 80 or port 443. Requests to the homepage, to the tax-resources index and to individual document URLs all time out after about twenty seconds. An independent proxy returns a Cloudflare 522, an origin connection timeout. There is no notice, no 404 page and no forwarding.
The archive shows how it got there. Real content served until about September 2025. From roughly October 2025 every path returned a transition notice instead, reading: The Federal Inland Revenue Service has transitioned to The Nigeria Revenue Service. You are being redirected. If you are not redirected automatically, click, followed by the new address. The last archived capture of that notice is 6 May 2026. After that the notice itself stops appearing, and now nothing does.
The detail that turns this from a lapsed hosting contract into a decision worth reporting is what else is still running. On the same probe, taxpromax.firs.gov.ng returns 200. tcc.firs.gov.ng, the tax clearance certificate service, returns 200. And einvoice.firs.gov.ng returns 200 and redirects cleanly to einvoice.nrs.gov.ng.
So the capability to forward an old FIRS address to its successor exists, and was configured. It was configured for the service that collects money. It was not configured for the document estate.
What is unreachable at its official address is not a brochure. The archived inventory runs to 291 unique PDFs published on that domain since 2020: the signed Finance Act 2020, the Income Tax Transfer Pricing Regulations 2018 and the official gazette that gave them force, the Country-by-Country Reporting Regulations and gazette, the information circular on VAT withholding guidelines, and public notices on VAT, withholding tax, PAYE and stamp duty. These are operative instruments. They are cited in advice, in filings and in judgments, by the URL that no longer answers.
There is one thing we could not establish, and it matters. We do not know whether the Nigeria Revenue Service has republished this material on its own site. Only 13 PDFs have ever been archived from nrs.gov.ng, and its sitemap lists 64 pages with no document index. But that is circumstantial. We tried to check the successor's own laws, guides and annual-report pages directly, and its bot protection served a Radware captcha page to an automated request and again to a full browser session. We could not get in, so we do not know, and we are not going to imply an answer we do not have.
We also checked whether this is simply how Nigerian agencies behave, and it is not. Of six Debt Management Office public-debt reports, the archived copy and the live copy are byte-identical on all six. Ninety National Bureau of Statistics reports were sampled and all ninety are live. Budget Implementation Reports from 2009 to 2025 are all present on the Budget Office site. Three comparable bodies, three clean results.
None of this establishes intent. A domain can go dark because a hosting contract lapsed, and an agency in the middle of a statutory rename has a great deal to do. What it establishes is that the published record of how Nigeria taxes its citizens is, at the addresses that reference it, currently unreachable, and that the same transition found the resources to preserve the link that lets people pay.
What this rests on
Our own probe of the live domain, repeated and confirmed independently, plus Internet Archive captures of the same URLs and an inventory built from the archive index. The negative controls on the Debt Management Office, the National Bureau of Statistics and the Budget Office were run the same way.
What this does not establish
It does not establish intent, or that anyone decided to remove the documents. A domain outage can be a lapsed contract. Critically, it does not establish that the documents are unavailable elsewhere: we could not determine whether the Nigeria Revenue Service has republished them, because its site blocked both an automated request and a full browser session with a captcha. It does not establish that any taxpayer has been harmed.
What we did ourselves
We probed the old domain rather than assuming a rename implies a redirect, found that the revenue-collecting subdomains were forwarded while the document estate was not, and ran three comparable federal bodies as controls so the finding could not be dismissed as normal practice.
Sources for this report
(A) Live probe of firs.gov.ng, www.firs.gov.ng and document URLs on 27 September 2026: DNS resolves to 66.22.96.124, no response on ports 80 or 443, independent proxy returns Cloudflare 522. Same probe: taxpromax.firs.gov.ng 200, tcc.firs.gov.ng 200, einvoice.firs.gov.ng 200 redirecting to einvoice.nrs.gov.ng, www.nrs.gov.ng 200. Internet Archive captures: real content to 20250901133053, transition notice at 20260305085803 and 20260506081736 (last). Archived inventory of 291 unique PDFs on the domain since 2020.
Confidence: high. This is our own assessment of whether the event occurred as described, separate from the grade, which describes what kind of thing the claim rests on.
Not obtained: where the underlying document is named above but not linked, we did not hold a copy at the time of publication. We purchase nothing and request nothing in our own name.
Corrections
None on this report. If you find an error, it will be published here, at the same length, with the date it was found, and the original wording will remain visible above it.