US taxation discriminatory to Bangladesh: NBR chairman

Chairman of the National Board of Revenue Md Mosharraf Hossain Bhuiyan has said Bangladesh faces “discrimination” in terms of taxation in the US.

Senior Correspondentbdnews24.com
Published : 2 May 2019, 04:38 PM
Updated : 2 May 2019, 04:38 PM

“We pay 15 percent tax on readymade garments export to the US market while for Vietnam it is 7-8 percent,” he said, speaking at the luncheon meeting of the American Chamber of Commerce in Bangladesh (AmCham) in Dhaka on Thursday.

AmCham President Md Nurul Islam chaired the meeting.

Mosharraf, speaking on the upcoming budget, told the foreign investors that Bangladesh does not discriminate against the overseas investors.

“Some of the countries even get benefit under the double taxation avoidance agreement,” he said, adding that Bangladesh’s readymade garments are doing better despite facing the problems.

The NBR boss asked the AmCham leaders to find out the discrepancies where investors as well as importers are directly affected and give him the list within a week.

“We’ll examine that,” he said, adding that in the upcoming budget they would try to give the similar benefits that the readymade garment exporters are enjoying to other exporters to encourage diversification.

Mosharraf said the government always follows “equitable” tax policy in which poor people pay their taxes at a lower rate and high income people pay taxes at a higher rate.

He said due to this equitable policy, they cannot practice the policy of “adequacy” in which taxes should be paid to the government in such a way that the revenue generation through that amount of taxes should be adequate for the government for running the development activities.

Mosharraf said corporate tax is not higher in Bangladesh than in other countries, as pointed out by many.

“We have analysed the corporate tax rates of our neighbouring countries and developed countries. In many countries it’s higher than Bangladesh. We are even a little better than India,” he said.

The NBR boss, however, said the corporate tax in tobacco industry is high because of the government’s policy to discourage tobacco consumption.