Ballooning backlog of lawsuits coupled with people's mindset to evade paying taxes appear as key challenges to revenue collection in Bangladesh, says the NBR chief, as they cannot exact huge tax potential.
"Many taxpayers opt to take shelter of courts ignoring us (NBR) even though they are aware of their respective taxability," the Chairman of the National Board of Revenue or NBR, Abu Hena Md. Rahmatul Muneem, told the media Thursday.
He also said the NBR is working to develop a mechanism to assess the taxable so that it is duly addressed.
The revenue-board chief, however, admitted faults on part of the taxmen as he said wrong assessment of the taxable earnings committed by the taxmen is one of the reasons for the filing of cases.
Mr Muneem made the observations while announcing the National VAT Day (Friday) and VAT Week at a press conference held at the NBR headquarters in Dhaka's Segunbagicha area. With the slogan 'Pay VAT Online, Participate in Nation Building' the NBR is going to mark the day aiming to encourage people to pay tax, create awareness and enhance the NBR staff's service standards.
The NBR chairman said revenue collection in July-November period increased by 15 per cent to Tk 1.26 trillion compared to the corresponding period.
He also said revenue collection would increase further once the reform measures taken by the NBR in recent times come into effect.
"Currently around 60-per cent VAT returns are submitted online," the NBR chairman told the newspersons.
They see huge potential for VAT collection both at retail and wholesale levels, but actual realization is yet very limited.
"We have come up with a new formula for proper VAT collection from this sector," he said, adding that the strategy will be unveiled soon.
"We hope that the celebration of VAT Week and VAT Day will raise awareness among mass people-they will be motivated to collect invoices," he said.
NBR VAT member Md Masud Sadiq, Abdul Mannan Shikdar and other high officials were present at the press conference.
A seminar and a reception to top VAT-payers are scheduled to be held this (Friday) morning at the IDEB conference room, as part of the campaign on value-added tax.
A number of campaign programmes, including promotional SMS, discussion programmes, seminar, and publishing newspaper supplements, will be conducted during the VAT week.
