Al Amin :
The National Board of Revenue (NBR) will follow the Document Verification System (DVS) in a bid to screen the audit reports strictly from the current assessment year (2021-22) to stop submission of fake one.
The Institute of Chartered Accountants of Bangladesh (ICAB) and the NBR have jointly developed the DVS to authenticate audited financial statements.
The step was taken to root out unscrupulous companies that submit fake reports to evade corporate tax.
Keeping in mind, the NBR requested all the companies to submit actual audit reports by next January.
Failure to submit the genuine audit report, the NBR will not accept the annual returns of the companies, the tax officials said. The DVS will definitely help NBR officials authenticate audited financial statements, NBR officials said.
They said all the registered companies submit audit reports with annual returns through certified accountants. But from now, the audit report must be posted on the website of the ICAB and a unique number will be generated automatically.
Followed by the tax officials will review the audit report through the DVS, they added.
It has been made mandatory for companies to keep their audit reports on DVS from the last December but only banks, financial institutions and multinational companies have followed the system.
As the financial year of the companies end in two categories, banks, financial institutions and multinational companies end the year in December.
Those companies file income tax returns with audit reports after that period. There are 300 to 400 such companies in the country.
The financial year of all the other companies ended in June. Those companies usually file income tax returns with audit reports within the next six months.
In addition, many non-filer companies have been given Tax Identification Number (TINs) this year. These companies were out of tax.
Companies, except banks, financial institutions and multinationals, will file income tax returns over the next few months and their audit reports must be kept in the ICAB’s system.
For this reason, the deadline for receiving the company’s actual audit report has been fixed the next January.
Around 28,000 companies submit returns each year. Of them, only 16,000 audit reports were found genuine. This means that the remaining 12,000 companies have been evading taxes by submitting fake audit reports. “It was too difficult to know the actual income and expenditure of the companies due to the submission of fake audit reports. If the tax authorities are strict in using ICAB’s DVS in screening the audit reports, the revenue collection will undoubtedly increase,” an NBR official said.
DVS is an application under which a document verification code (DVC) will be automatically generated by the system after the submission of some specific information by the auditor.
