The National Board of Revenue (NBR) has decided to increase the tax base by adding 320,000 new taxpayers in the running fiscal (2015-16), aiming to increase the tax-GDP ratio.
Currently the tax-GDP ratio of the country is just over ten percent. The corresponding figure is more than 15 percent in the neighbouring countries.
“The Board has sent letters directing its field offices to find the new taxpayers,” a senior official of the NBR told UNB.
Value Added Tax (VAT) and Income Tax wings will help each other through information sharing to find the non-listed eligible taxpayers of the country, he added.
He also said that the NBR has prepared directives for its field offices to attain the target for the revenue collector of the national exchequer.
According to the officials, the NBR has decided to step up its efforts in this regard as it is aiming to meet a gigantic target of Tk 176,370 crore for the 2015-16 fiscal, against Tk 135,028 that it earned in the last fiscal.
“To achieve the target, the NBR is aiming to remain focused right from the very start of the fiscal,” the NBR official said.
As things are planned, an amount of Tk 64,971 crore will come from income tax, Tk 64,262 crore from VAT and Tk 18,752 from import duty. The target for export duty has been fixed at Tk 37 crore, excise duty at Tk 1,239 crore and supplementary duty at Tk 25,875 crore.
Currently, the enlisted number of taxpayers in the country is around 1.8 million. In the last fiscal (2014-15) some 1.07 million taxpayers submitted their income tax returns. The number is actually down from the 2013-14 fiscal, when the number of taxpayers amounted to 1.16 million.
Finance Minister AMA Muhith in his budget speech stated that the government wanted to increase the tax base to three million by 2018. The Finance Minister also directed the NBR to prepare a roadmap to find out the ways to increase revenue collection.
NBR member M Farid Uddin is the convenor of the committee to prepare the roadmap, while Dr Mahbubur Rahman and Firoz Shah Alam are also members.
The committee recently assembled information from the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics, all city corporations and metropolitan areas, and other related organizations. It found that some 7.6 million business houses, despite being in a good financial position, do not even have a tax file. According to the information of NBR and BBS, only one million pay taxes at all. Of the total number of business houses, 4.6 million business houses are on strong footing.
The BBS in 2013 collected information of over 8 million business houses and their owners, and found that some 4.5 million business houses are on strong footing, while another 2.9 million are more in a middle-of-the-road state.
The BBS also collected information on the types of the business houses, their economic condition, goods and services they offer, number of employees, type of equity and income tax-related information of the owners.
“The NBR is preparing to start its drive as per a specific work plan and gradually it will bring all eligible persons under the tax net,” the NBR official said.
