NBR exceeds revenue target for third straight year

The National Board of Revenue or NBR has crossed the revenue collection target for fiscal 2016-17, which it says is the third time to happen in a row.

Staff Correspondentbdnews24.com
Published : 26 July 2017, 12:27 PM
Updated : 26 July 2017, 12:27 PM

In the last fiscal year, the NBR has mobilised nearly Tk 1.86 trillion, which is a little over the revised target of Tk 1.85 trillion.

The figure is 19 percent bigger than the collection of FY2015-16 -- Tk 1.55 trillion -- which had also surpassed the target of that fiscal year.

The original target for fiscal 2016-17 was Tk 2.03 trillion.

At a press conference at the NBR headquarters in Dhaka’s Segunbagicha on Wednesday, Chairman Nojibur Rahman disclosed the latest data on the revenue collection and celebrated the feat as ‘the biggest success in history’.

“We created a record by crossing the revenue collection target for three consecutive years. Our infrastructure is being strengthened to increase revenue collection in the new fiscal year,” he said.

Finance Minster AMA Muhith had rolled out a Tk 4.26 trillion budget for FY2017-18 in June with an initial plan for a 15 percent uniform VAT rate under a new law.

While it had a revenue target of Tk 2.88 trillion, the minister planned to collect Tk 2.48 trillion of that through NBR, which is about 35 percent greater than the amount collected in the last fiscal year.

The minister also initially aimed to earn over Tk 910 billion of this amount from value-added tax or VAT alone.

The income tax target had been set near Tk 870 billion, while the customs tax revenue target was Tk 730 billion.

But the proposal triggered widespread criticisms that later led the government to suspend the new VAT law for two more years, keeping the existing multiple rates of VAT, and that served a big blow to Muhith’s plan to implement the budget.

Economists have said it would force the government to widen the tax net to meet the revenue deficit and pile pressure on the National Board of Revenue.