Dhaka – The National Board of Revenue (NBR) is collecting list of names and salary statements of officials and employees of the private sector organizations, sensing it could fetch considerable amount of revenue from there.
“We are very much hopeful about gathering a significant amount of revenue from there,” a senior NBR official said.
He said that the NBR thinks that a good number of private organisations of the country are involved in evading taxes while paying salaries and wages to their officials and employees.
“I don’t want to mention any name, but we have found this kind of evasion,” he added.
Currently, the NBR is gathering information about the officials and employees of all private universities, colleges, schools, private hospitals, diagnostic centres, private companies, television channels, posh hotels and other organisations like these.
Responding to a query, the NBR official said that it is open secret that a huge number of private organisations disburse their salary and wages in cash. There are two types of record books for this purpose, one for actual and another to show the government agencies.
“The record book for showing the government agencies contains lower salary structure, this is just for evading tax,” he said.
In this connection, he mentioned that some private organisations show reluctance to disburse the salary through banking channel as this system will open everything to the tax authority regarding salary and wages of the officials and employees.
“That why the NBR has decided to collect the information of the private organisations and check whether taxes are paid properly or not,” the NBR official said.
The NBR went for this drive as part of its plan to improve tax collection along with increasing the number of new taxpayers by at least 300,000 by June next.
According to official data, the number of TIN or e-TIN holders in the country is 18,61,682. Of them 17,76,401 are individual taxpayers.
In the fiscal year 2014-15, some 10,40,354 people submitted their income tax returns while the number of companies that submitted tax returns was 23,011. The NBR has got a gigantic target of Tk 176,370 crore revenue collection for the fiscal year 2015-16 against Tk 135,028 last year.
This year, the target was set to collect Tk 64,971 crore from income tax, while Tk 64,262 crore from VAT and Tk 18,752 from import duty. The target for export duty has been fixed at Tk 37 crore, excise duty at Tk 1,239 crore and supplementary duty at Tk 25,875.
