A National Board of Revenue committee on SIM replacement tax in its fresh final report last week maintained its claim for Tk 3,010.99 crore in tax from four mobile operators — Grameenphone, Robi, Banglalink and Airtel, said officials. The NBR has been demanding the amount in tax since early 2012 claiming that the operators had dodged the tax through selling old SIMs to new clients. The mobile phone companies, however, denied the allegation saying that they did not sell any SIM to new client but replaced the old SIMs for the original customers.
The committee submitted its final report for the second time last week as the mobile operators and telecommunication regulator denied signing the previous final report claiming that the NBR representatives prepared the report deviating from the agreed terms of references.
Committee sources said that Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission had recently proposed a method for calculating the tax amount. Calculation using the method lowered the tax to Tk 520.60 crore from the NBR claim for Tk 3,010 crore, they said.
Committee sources said the BTRC in a report on April 9, upon demand from the NBR for the second time, mentioned various processes to determine the user of a SIM card before and after replacement.
According to the proposed BTRC method, total unpaid tax of Grameenphone is Tk 331.88 crore, that of Robi Tk 121.69 crore, that of Banglalink Tk 65.79 crore and that of Airtel Tk 1.24 crore.
‘But the NBR committee in the final report has suggested that the BTRC method should not be counted as the method failed to confirm the users before and after the replacement beyond doubt,’ a member of the committee told New Age.
He said the BTRC, however, suggested taking into consideration ‘maybe’ factor and eliminating the claims which match the new criteria.
‘But in tax issue we cannot rely on “maybe”. For example, the BTRC’s latest report said if the IMIE numbers of the SIMs do not match, we should consider the FnF Numbers or BTS location as parameters. Then it said if the last two parameter match, we may consider that it is the same user and eliminate that SIM from count,’ he said.
He said the final report mentioned the BTRC’s explanation for its calculation method.
‘But the representatives of the mobile operators to the committee were not present in the meetings during the last phase of the report finalisation process,’ he said.
The BTRC officials, however, said that process they proposed was the only possible solution to finding out the users of SIM cards without hard evidence.
‘We suggested the NBR that it should consider the call detailed record which is system generated. As the CDR does not contain name of the owner of SIM, the NBR rejected the proposal. But CDR verification is a worldwide accepted practice for determining user,’ a senior BTRC official told New Age.
He said that the NBR in a letter asked the BTRC which of the BTRC methods it should consider for the SIM replacement tax calculation as the telecom regulator proposed two methods.
‘We suggested the NBR that it should consider the second method although the core concept of both the methods is same. In the second method, we described the grounds for considering the parameters,’ he said.
The large taxpayers unit of the NBR in July 2013 had formed a tripartite committee consisting representatives of NBR, LTU, BTRC and the four operators to set payable amount evaluating the claim.
-With New Age input
