Eid shopping slows down NBR drive to net new taxpayers

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Doulot Akter Mala
The ongoing countrywide tax survey being conducted by the National Board of Revenue (NBR) has slowed down recently as shopkeepers at city markets are busy in dealing with a huge rush of Eid shoppers, an NBR high official said.
"We do not want to disrupt the peak season of business ahead of the Eid festival," he said adding that the tax survey will re-start after the festivity is over.
According to latest statement of tax survey, 20 of the NBR's teams have found 993 new taxpayers from September 19 to 27 in the capital alone.
Until September 27, the survey teams have found around 32,000 new taxpayers in Dhaka and 15,203 in divisional cities.
A total of 48 teams have been conducting the survey throughout the country.
The NBR has assigned 20 teams, including the existing eight, to work in Dhaka city.
On the other hand, 11 teams have been working in Chittagong, three in Rajshahi, five in Khulna, and three teams each in Barisal, Sylhet and Rangpur.
The NBR decided to expand its survey to identify new taxpayers in district towns from January next year after the surveys conducted in the city corporations and metropolitan towns were found productive proved fruitful.
On March 29 this year, the board started the survey in businesses and professional houses in Dhaka city. About 57 per cent new taxpayers in the city's posh shopping malls were identified.
The NBR then started another survey from July 5 this year in areas under all the city corporations as well as in Rangpur Pourashava (municipality) to net in new taxpayers.
Targeting businessmen and professionals, the board aims to bring some 164,000 new taxpayers under the tax net during July-December period this year.
The new taxpayers will have to start paying taxes from the next fiscal.
Businesses already registered with Taxpayer Identification Number (TIN), have only to mention the number in the survey form but new taxpayers have to provide detail information to get a new TIN.
The NBR has been receiving tax returns only from 0.6 million taxpayers out of 2.1 million TIN holders.
The NBR insiders believe that the survey will help to identify the fake TIN holders as well as find new taxpayers amongst the businesses.
Sources said such initiatives will help the government to achieve its target for the current fiscal and added that the government in the past was compelled to make downward revisions of the tax revenue collection target because of poor mobilisation.
In fiscal 2006-07, the tax revenue target was set at Tk 410.55 billion in the original budget, which was revised to Tk 374.79 billion.
The government has set a revenue target of Tk 438.50 billion for the current fiscal.
In this fiscal, the board has been able to collect around Tk 8.02 billion tax from the undisclosed money holders, the income is in addition to the projected tax revenue collection for the current fiscal.