NBR orders strict monitoring on business firms paying lower taxThe National Board of Revenue (NBR) has directed its field offices to further increase its intensive monitoring on the business organisations that are lagging behind in paying tax as the second quarter of the current fiscal has gone.

"The NBR chairman has given the directives to the field offices to intensify monitoring on the business entities that are showing slower or negative growth," a senior official of the revenue collecting authority told UNB.

The NBR official said that they have information that a good number of business organisations are paying lower revenue.

He said if revenue collection, tax and VAT, from these business houses can be boosted up it would help the revenue collecting authority to fetch significant amount of revenue to touch its target for the running fiscal.

"To attain the huge revenue target the NBR has no other option to increase its revenue collection from the existing pockets along with widen its VAT and tax net," the senior official said.

The NBR official mentioned that strengthening of monitoring would not be a tough job for them as the NBR already has the data of the business houses which are paying less tax.

"We believe that if we can monitor these business houses it would not be a tough job for us to improve the revenue collection," he added.

The NBR has already decided to prepare list of sectors and business entities to widen the Value Added Tax (VAT).

On the other hand, it has made mandatory to use ECR or POS for all kind of shops to strictly monitor the revenue earnings.

The NBR has taken a plan to import 10,000 ECR machines under tax-and duty-free facility for installing in small and big businesses to supply to the businesses at cost price to help them comply with government order on mandatory installation of the machine.

In July 2008, the NBR issued an order making the installation of the ECR mandatory by 11 categories of service providers to check VAT evasion.

The service providers are hotel, restaurants and fast food shops, sweetmeat shops, furniture sales centres, beauty parlours, community centres, posh shopping centres in metropolitan areas and relevant business organisation, department stores, general stores and other big and medium -- wholesale and retail --business organisations.

The order took effect on July 1, 2008 for the business organisations of all city corporations and district towns across the country.

Under the system, the businesses concerned will have to give the printed transaction slips to the respective customers. The customers have also been asked to take ECR-printed slips from the shops and to complain to the NBR if they are denied the slips by the shops.

This fiscal year the NBR will have to collect Tk 2,03,152 crore where VAT will be the biggest contributor with Tk 72,764 crore. Tk 71,940 crore will come from income tax and tax on profit, supplementary duty will contribute Tk 30,075 crore, excise duty Tk 4,449 crore, export duty Tk 44 crore and other taxes and duties will contribute Tk 1,428 crore.

 

UNB