Al Amin :
The National Board of Revenue (NBR) is going to introduce DEDO ‘Pay’ app to settle the Value-Added Tax (VAT) refund claims of the foreign organizations timely.
The officials said that the facilitated companies or organizations will have a unique Identification number and they will able to track all the up-to-date status related to the refund application by e-mail.
The app will help the officials to make claim voucher, scrutinize online VAT Chalan, produce automated note sheet and to take decision whether the application is accepted or not.
The app will also help the officials to identify fake or expired application and there will also have opportunity to use Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology, they said. Using the AI technology,
the NBR officials will be able to select all the documents related to the refund claims without any error. As a result, the app will reduce time to settle the application, they said.
“We have taken step to upgrade DEDO as department from current directorate,” said Md Belal Hossain Chowdhury, Director-General of the Duty Exemption and Drawback Office (DEDO).
He noted that services of the DEDO are linked with image of the country as foreign missions and embassies get VAT refund from the wing and DEDO has disbursed Tk 390 million worth of refunds to the foreign organizations so far.
The DEDO, the lone entity to pay back VAT to foreign organizations, has taken the initiative following the request of the foreign organisations in Bangladesh, including UN agencies, as they expect to get VAT refund expeditiously.
The foreign agencies are exempted from VAT on local buys and non-bonded exporters on raw-material imports as per the tax law.
The officials of the DEDO has made the move to automate its services to cut VAT-refund-claim-disposal time to an hour and speed up its other services. The DEDO has run its activities under manual system since 1987.
Currently, processing and resolving refund claims of the UN organizations, embassies and diplomatic missions need more than a week-sometimes staggering over several months or years.
The officials said some refund applications remained pending since 2018 and were resolved only recently. The DEDO recently developed a website and also sent a proposal to the NBR to develop a VAT-refund app.
The planned refund app ‘DEDOPAY’ will help the foreign organisations to submit refund applications and get refund of the paid VAT from the DEDO as is empowered to settle VAT-refund claims of them.
Annoyed over the time-consuming procedures in the VAT provisions delaying VAT refund to its agencies, the UN office in Bangladesh earlier had sought upfront exemption status for them.
Then United Nations Resident Coordinator in Bangladesh Mia Seppo in a letter to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs expressed her concern over the complexities in the outmoded refund process.
In the letter on October 4, 2021, it was alleged that the DEDO had not processed and reimbursed VAT claims of the UN agencies since July 2019.
From January 17 to February 15, the DEDO had refunded VAT worth Tk 395 million by resolving 385 cases of UNHCR, UNICEF, UNDP, WFP, UNFPA, WFP, WHO, ILO, IBRD, IFC, ICDDR,B and different embassies.
Of the organizations, UNFPA got Tk 200-million refund followed by WHO Tk 7.9 million and ICBBR,B Tk 2.6 million.
