Staff Reporter :
The National Board of Revenue (NBR) has locked over thousand Business Identification Numbers (BINs) for violating the conditions of bonded lincence and other irregularities.
The board has also directed the country’s customs offices to check whether the raw materials have been imported and exported by the BIN holders at all.
Bond Comissionarate of Dhaka took the measure recently to stop the random misuse of the Bonded Warehouse facility.
Currently, there are over 7,000 bond licences including locked BINs. Of these, around 900 are companies are not active in the business, according to a data.
Bonded Warehouse, known as bond licence, has been provided to export oriented industries for importing raw materials without paying any duty or taxes.
NBR provides the benefits to encourage export oriented industrialization and facilitate exports.
NBR officials said that the BINs have been locked due to non-compliance with bond licensed business conditions, failure to provide annual export-import data, non-cooperation in audit activities and misuse of bond facility.
Abul Kasem Khan, Chairperson of Business Initiative Leading Development (BUILD), told The New Nation, “The businesses, misusing the bonded warehouse facility, must be subjugated with hard-handed as the special facility has been provided to the exporters to boost the sector.”
In this case, NBR should strengthen its detection procedure including audit system and capacity building, he said.
On the other hand, the NBR should be careful so that the genuine exporters are not damaged for some dishonest traders, he added. He further said NBR can set up area-based bonded warehouse to prevent the misuse.
Many businesses import raw materials and sell in the local market. It is violating the conditions of the bond licence as well as the government is losing a huge amount of revenue every year.Shawkat Hossain, Commissioner of Bond Comissionarate of Dhaka, said, “It is our normal process to prevent misuse of bond facility.”
According to a data, BINs of 3,555 businesses have been locked till March 21 of the current fiscal year. Of these, BINs of about 300 licensees have been unlocked at the request of the owners of the companies and on the promise not to break the conditions.
Businesses need an active BIN number for running business including import-export.
