No major change in upcoming budget: Muhith

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UNB, Dhaka :
Hinting at no major change in the upcoming national budget Finance Minister AMA Muhith on Thursday said that the ongoing measures in the revenue collection will continue in the next fiscal.
“This is election year. No new initiative is possible to take in the new budget”, he said while addressing the 39th consultative meeting of the National Board of Revenue (NBR) at Sonargaon Hotel in the city, jointly organised by NBR and Federation of Bangladesh Chambers of Commerce and Industries (FBCCI). In the meeting, the FBCCI demands to increase the income tax waiver limit to 350,000
from the existing limit of Tk 250,000 and reducing the corporate tax by 2.5 percent. Corporate tax limit now exists from 25-35 percent for different categories. With FBCCI president Shafiul Islam Mohiuddin in the chair, the function was also addressed by about 50 representatives from different trade bodies and business chambers across the country.
NBR chairman Mosharraf Hossain Bhuiyan and Bangladesh Investment Development Authority (BIDA) chairman Kazi Aminul Islam also spoke on the occasion.
The Finance Minister said the government will lay special emphasis on the agro-processing and SME sector.
He observed that agro processing sector has huge potential in our country as traditionally Bangladeshi entrepreneurs have been doing better in the value addition business. “We have significantly done well in readymade garment sector where value addition was the main thing”, he said adding similarly agro-processing has advanced a lot and there is scope to go further. He also positively responded to the demands for reduction of taxes for e-Commerce sector, local bread and biscuit manufacturing industries, poultry sector, and import of stone and hard rock for road constructions. Muhith said that the number of taxpayers have increased significantly in last one decades as now 30 lakh people pay income taxes while it was 7 lakh in 2009, 14 lakh in 2016. He said the government has been trying to remove the fear of harassment in tax payment, which he claimed resulted in such increase in the number of taxpayers. Responding to observation on poor road condition for which transport sector suffers a lot, he said the government has introduced a system in road construction that whenever a contractor gets a contract, it has to maintain the road for three years in the post-construction period.
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