The National Board of Revenue (NBR) has revived its plan to identify barriers that constrain making the online income tax returns user-friendly.
The income tax wing of the board has formed a high-powered committee to complete the BITAX system for the submission of income tax return.
The seven-member committee, headed by income tax (tax information management and services) Hafiz Ahmed Murshed, will prepare an action plan to make the online return submission system friendlier to taxpayers.
Officials said the BITAX was a component of the Asian Development Bank (ADB)-funded Strengthening Governance Management Project.
The project ended last year, keeping the completion of online return system half-way through.
But officials insisted taxpayers can now submit tax returns in the system, although they may have to face some problems.
"The online return submission system was not fully completed as we expected. We will make it user-friendly," said Mr Murshed.
He said the Vietnam-based FPT will handle the technical aspects with government funding.
However, there is allegation against the company from different quarters, including Implementation Monitoring Evaluation Division (IMED) under the ministry of planning.
In an evaluation report on the ADB project in June last, the IMED said the system could not be run without technical support from the FPT, thus putting the confidentiality of taxpayers' information on the line.
The IMED also alleged the system has not been handed over even after the conclusion of the project.
The nine-year project got extension thrice.
The project worth Tk 780 million was taken up in 2011 and completed in November 2019.
Earlier, the immediate past NBR chairman Mosharraf Hossain Bhuiyan, in a letter to the ADB and IMED, requested both agencies to take action against the FPT for its failure to complete the online return submission successfully.
Responding to a query on FPT's performance in VAT online project, Mr Murshed said the IMED report sidestepped FPT's performance in other areas.
NBR officials said they would try to popularise the online system by detecting its bottlenecks.
The committee will prepare an action plan that would include a campaign for popularising the online tax return by educating the taxpayers and taxmen alike, Mr Murshed said.
The committee held meetings on Sunday and last Thursday to discuss the action plan, he said.
So far, some 5,000 taxpayers submitted income tax returns online out of 2.2 million taxpayers.
Another senior official of the NBR said the online return submission module remained under construction.
People may find it non-functional beyond the return submission period.
Time for tax return submission for individual taxpayers started from July 1 and it will expire on November 30 next.
In the current fiscal's budget, the government has offered an incentive to the tune of Tk 2,000 as rebate for new taxpayers, who will submit tax returns online.
