Revenue officials are reportedly chasing people and companies aggressively to maximise collections by the year amid huge collection deficit caused by global economic crisis and nationwide shutdown in the wake of Covid-19 pandemic, as per a report in our daily. But many believe the tax authority should take a ‘benevolent approach’ in this crisis situation without going aggressive in hunting arrear taxes from companies and individuals.
It’s a tragedy that the government spends before thinking about how it collects its revenues. The administration must realise that it has no income of its own but must instead depend upon the economic activities of its citizens. So even the amounts which the government supposedly gives from its own pockets comes from the people.
In such a time of global pandemic when the entire world is undergoing a recession the administration must be amenable to the wishes of its tax-payers. The small and medium businesses (SMEs) — which generate the most employment in the economy, must be especially sheltered from such a storm of revenue gathering.
Instead the government must look to its own policies for reducing income. The government has increased its subsidies by nine times to power to around Tk 9000 crore. That’s roughly USD 1.1 billion — money which is bigger than many of our industries like leather. We need to renegotiate those contracts for quick power which is gobbling up a lot of the subsidies. This is looting on a national scale — our citizens are paying greater amounts for power while still enduring load shedding as we have not managed to fix our transmissions infrastructure. Meanwhile every industry is set to lose money — the RMG sector may lose upto USD 4 billion, which is a huge amount. Every other sector like tourism or retail is expected to show negative growth. So how on earth will the small businesses come up with the money? Instead the government has set impractical targets in the national budget without identifying the actual problems during the current economic slowdown caused by the coronavirus pandemic which will ultimately frustrate the economic recovery process.
In the absence of normal economic activities and the broken healthcare system everybody is facing hardship except the plunderers of public money. Many of such people will evade payment of tax. They may not be in the country. So we say that the tax-payers should be allowed to pay by easy instalments. The Board of Revenue and the other authorities entitled to collect other dues should concentrate on collecting money from those plunderers whether or not facing corruption cases. Those who are in jail should be set free if they are ready to pay tax conditionally that necessary adjustments would be made in light of the results of court cases.
