Business Desk :
The field office of value added tax (VAT) and audit team is going to examine the authenticity of audited financial statements submitted by companies along with their returns.
The National Board of Revenue (NBR) has taken the move to curb the scope for evasion of indirect tax paid by the consumers.
In order to do the scrutiny, the NBR today signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) deal with the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Bangladesh (ICAB) for using the Document Verification System (DVS), an online system developed by the ICAB to verify the authenticity of audited reports.
“There is a tendency of many businesses to submit fake audit report. The DVS will enable us to curb that scope and help get actual amount of revenue from firms,” said Md Masud Sadiq, member for VAT policy of the NBR.
Sadiq and ICAB President Mahmudul Hasan Khusru signed the MoU on behalf of the respective organisations at the NBR headquarters.
As per the plan, ICAB’s practising members will give five key financial data such as profit, turnover, asset and liability of a company, generate an 18-digit document verification code (DVC), write the DVC in the audited financial statements and sign the report.
And the VAT officials will get access to the DVS to verify the authenticity of these key figures in the audited financial statements to be furnished by companies and firms to the VAT offices.
The NBR move comes as it made submission of audited financial reports mandatory by firms from the current fiscal year of 2021-22.
Sadiq said the VAT wing of the NBR will start verifying audited statements to be submitted by firms using the DVS.
In July this year, Bangladesh Bank also asked banks to examine the audit reports of loan applicants through DVS, developed last year to eliminate the scope of submission of manipulated audited financial statements by business to get loans.
