Economic Reporter :
The National Board of Revenue (NBR) is set to take a set of proactive measures to integrate its income tax wing and customs wing to check income tax evasion by the importers, sources said.
To this effect, the revenue board authority is initially going to make mandatory incorporation of electronic taxpayer identification numbers in the bill of entry for importers to facilitate its income tax wing scrutinising import data for checking income tax evasion.
Officials said that integration of e-TINs with the automated wed-based system of the NBR, known as Asycuda World, would allow the income tax authorities to crosscheck taxpayers’ import-related data furnished with the income tax files to detect any mismatch.
Taxmen suspect that many taxpayers having import business particularly of tax-exempted goods do not show their actual income from import business in the tax files to evade income tax.
Income tax officials don’t have any mechanism to crosscheck the data furnished by the importers in absence of online integration while checking of the huge volume of import documents manually is almost impossible, they said.
Field-level tax officials cannot know the actual volume of import and income from the import business, they added.
“The new initiative will surely help check tax evasion and boost collection of the revenue board,” he hopped.
“After making the integration error free, we will then initiate to introduce some other decisions,” the NBR official said.
Under the proposed integration, importers must have to provide their e-TINs with the bill of entry in the Asycuda World system, a senior NBR official said.
He said that the income tax wing of the NBR made the proposal of integration so that they could work with the customs wing to check income tax evasion.
Officials said that the revenue board would request the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) to incorporate a provision in the system for mandatory furnishing of e-TINs in the bill of entry.
A team from the UNCTAD is scheduled to visit Bangladesh in February, they said.
According to the existing provision, importers have to provide 54 types of information including business identification number (BIN) and import registration certificate (IRC) in the bill of entry they submit to the Asycuda World system.
Inclusion of e-TIN in the bill of entry will facilitate the taxmen to scrutinise tax files of importers.
In most of the cases, importers show import of products under which they have already paid tax at source on import stage so that they can claim tax rebate.
But they hide the import data of tax-exempted goods that they import and sell in the local market and generate income.
Income tax officials now will be able to detect any concealment of import data in the tax files by obtaining bill of entry using the Asycuda system.
