The e-TIN services remained suspended across the country since its hardware crashed on Tuesday night.
Due to technical glitches in the hardware of the electronic Taxpayer Identification Number (e-TIN) system, a senior official at the National Board of Revenue (NBR) said, it went out of order suddenly.
"The board is trying to find out and fix the problem," he said. The ICT wing of the NBR was working until the filing of this report at 7 Pm on Wednesday.
The e-TIN is mandatory to get 38 types of services like opening and continuation of bank accounts, investing in savings certificates, purchasing cars, and registration of land and property.
On Wednesday, the people could not avail the services that require e-TIN.
IT experts said the tax authority should have a Disaster Recovery (DR) centre as a backup of such a highly important system so that it can continue providing essential services amid any emergency situation like this one.
The NBR official, however, assured that there was nothing to be worried about the incident as there is already a backup system of all data at the Bangladesh Computer Council (BCC).
"There is no chance to lose the e-TIN database having information of over 8.0 million taxpayers," he added.
Another tax official said the software of the e-TIN system has been developed by a local company, Synesis IT Ltd, which is supposed to support the NBR in case of any technical glitch in the software.
He said the NBR kept unpaid a part of service charges of the company despite the expiry of the contract period in June last year.
However, the company is still providing system support to the e-TIN system as per verbal commitment of the NBR to sign a post-warranty contract.
Another source at the NBR said the company handed over the system to the ICT wing of the NBR after expiry of the contract. None of the officials at the ICT wing were willing to comment on the issue.
The e-Tin is a nationally important system, integrated with the Election Commission (EC) database to interlink with the National Identification (NID) number of all citizens.
The NBR has launched the e-TIN in 2013 after automating the tax registration numbers. The system is considered as a milestone of digitisation of the tax department.
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