Polluters to pay green tax

The National Board of Revenue has finally detected some 757 industrial units across the country as environmental culprits, which will have to pay green taxes.
The Board has issued a gazette with the names of the industries that will have to pay 1.0 per cent surcharge, for the first time, for environment pollution.
The environment protection surcharge, imposed through the Finance Bill-2014, was made effective from February 22, 2015.
The tax authorities took long seven months to issue the gazette due to delay in identification of polluting industries by the Department of Environment (DoE).
The green tax was scheduled to be effective from July 1 last year. Due to complexities of the process, the polluting industries got relief from payment of the penal taxes from July 1, 2014 to February 21, 2015.
With the issuance of the gazette, the polluting industries of the country will have to pay one per cent surcharge on prices of their goods for the first time.
The NBR circulated the gazette to all of the field-level VAT offices across the country.
In the gazette, the NBR listed names of all the 757 industries located in Dhaka, Chittagong, Rajshahi and Khulna districts.
Of the districts, the highest number of polluting industries is located in greater Dhaka zone followed by Chittagong, Rajshahi and Khulna.
The industries are mainly tanneries, leather industries, washing and dying plants, hospitals, pharmaceutical industries, chemical industries, textile mills etc.
The Value Added Tax (VAT) wing of the NBR will collect the 1.0 per cent surcharge from the industries at the time of collecting VAT under the 'Environment Protection Surcharge Collection Rules 2014'.
The amount of surcharge would be non-tax revenue that the government will spend on protection of the environment.
There are some allegations on snail's pace of the authorities concerned to issue the gazette as an influential group of people was lobbying for exclusion of their industries from the list.
There were names of some 2,500 companies in the primary list of the DoE. The department selected those who faced penal action so far for violating the Environment Conservation Act1995. Later, the list has been trimmed.
Officials said the identified industries polluted environment by not installing Effluent Treatment Plant (ETP) and through other ways.
They said names of the industries will be updated after a certain period of time. The industries will, however, be de-listed on their becoming compliant while new non-compliant ones included.
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