Economic Reporter :
The online tax payment system of the National Board of Revenue remained almost ineffective even after four and half years of its introduction mainly due to different limitations and lack of taxpayers’ interest to use the system.
The e-payment system introduced in May, 2012 does not allow payment of taxes in large volume and money transfer directly from bank accounts.
Taxpayers having accounts in 26 banks linked with the Q-cash network can only pay a small amount of taxes using the debit and credit cards of the banks or the prepaid cards of Sonali Bank through the NBR-Sonali Bank e-payment system.
Even the e-payment portal has remained out of development and maintenance for more than one year though a private firm is informally conducting maintenance works following verbal request of the revenue board to keep the system alive.
In this context, officials said, the NBR has taken various initiatives including signing an agreement with the firm for development and maintenance of the system to make it effective.
They said that only a small number of individual taxpayers paid very negligible amount of taxes, mainly income taxes during the week-long income tax fairs, online over the last few years since the inception of the system as one stop gateway for paying income tax, VAT and customs duty.
The system remained unused in the remaining periods of the year, a high official of the NBR told The New Nation on Sunday.
He said that taxpayers paid between Tk 1 crore and Tk 2 crore in income tax during the fairs.
Though there is no maximum limit of paying taxes using cards, small taxpayers only availed the facility as taxpayers are needed to recharge the card of Sonali Bank.
Taxpayers did not accept it well as they cannot pay large volume of taxes using the system while the system does not support transfer of taxes directly from the taxpayers’ accounts, he said.
Importers and exporters cannot make their duty payments using the e-payment portal as it was not integrated with the Asycuda World Software of the customs department, he said.
In duty payment, traders need to provide some additional information which the e-payment system does not support, he added.
Local IT firm Datasoft is now maintaining the portal www.nbrepayment.gov.bd on verbal request of the NBR since November 2015 after the International Finance.
