Tk309.46b stuck up in 24,572 revenue cases pending with HC

Chief Justice Surendra Kumar Sinha on Tuesday highlighted the urgency for overhauling the age-old obsolete laws for speedy settlement of cases pending in different courts for recovery of huge amount of taxes remaining stuck due to disputes between the tax administration and taxpayers.
To settle the pending tax-related cases faster, he also stressed the need for using the Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) process as, he said, it is quite impossible to handle the huge backlog of cases with an inadequate number of judges.
“We can not settle as many as 380,000 cases with only 100 judges in the Supreme Court. There are only six benches to speed up settlement of business and tax-related cases,” said the Chief justice while addressing a seminar on ‘Management of tax-related cases and Effectiveness of ADR’ at a local hotel on Tuesday.
According to a keynote paper, prepared by the National Board of Revenue (NBR), there are around 24,572 business-related cases, involving Tk 309.46 billion in revenue, related to income tax, customs duty and value-added tax waiting for settlement at the High Court division. The amount is around 17.55 per cent of the country’s revenues target in the current fiscal.
The NBR has found that its VAT wing is overwhelmed with the highest volume of stuck-up revenue worth about Tk 179.38 billion due to 3,226 pending cases. The Customs wing has stuck-up revenue of Tk 48.35 billion having 17,470 pending cases. Some Tk 81.82 billion income tax remained unrealised with 2,711 court cases filed by the taxpayers.
[email protected]
-NZF-