NBR plans to target local political leaders in push for tax

The chairman of the National Board of Revenue has said many of the union parishad chairmen spent millions of taka during the election but they are not taxpayers.

“It is our duty to bring them on board,” said Md Mosharraf Hossain Bhuiyan.

“But we have to be very cautious about bringing people into the tax net.”

Bhuiyan was speaking at a luncheon meeting hosted by the American Chamber of Commerce in Bangladesh in Dhaka on Tuesday on the upcoming budget.

He said they would take some measures to improve the contribution of tax revenue to the GDP from the current level of 8-9 percent, lowest in the region.

For that, Bhuiyan said, the government would implement its previous plan to make the use of electronic cash registers mandatory as part of the automation of VAT collection. Earlier in 2007-08, the use of machines was made compulsory, but that was not implemented.

The NBR chairman said they would take “stringent” measures in the next fiscal year to boost VAT collections.

“VAT is collected from consumers, but all of them are not accumulated to the public exchequer. This is because of lack of capacity of the NBR. I would also say it was because of some businesspeople as well.”

“We will have to develop some system. We are working to make automation for the collection of revenue particularly collecting VAT.”

Bhuiyan said earlier the ECR machine could not be made compulsory for “non-cooperation” from some sections and “negligence” from government employees.

Talking on the second way of increasing revenue, he cited an example of a union council election where the chairman candidate privately told him that he spent Tk 10 million.

The NBR chairman said some of the union parishad chairmen in villages spent Tk 20 to Tk 30 million.

“Where they get the money from?” he said.

Bhuiyan said he would not be lenient to officials if he found any businessman facing harassment. But he also urged the “elite” of the society to be compliant with the tax law.

Replying to a question, he said they consider reducing taxes for the import of infrastructure-related products which are not made in Bangladesh.

AmCham President Md Nurul Islam presided over the meeting.