TAX DODGING
NBR to ask 50,000 house, shop owners to submit wealth reports
Starts serving notices from July 1
The National Board of Revenue is going to serve notices to 50,000 suspected tax-dodging house and shop owners, who do not have taxpayer identification numbers, from July 1 asking them to submit their wealth statement and pay income tax, said NBR chairman Ghulam Hussain on Sunday.
‘From July 1, the tax offices will start sending notices to the tax-evading owners of houses, apartments and business establishments across the country asking them to submit wealth statement, take TINs and pay tax,’ the NBR chairman told New Age after a seminar on ASYCUDA World in the capital.
Among the detected tax dodgers, 30,000 are house and apartment owners and 20,000 run business entities mainly shops, he said.
He said that the revenue board identified the people through an ongoing door-to-door survey started from December 2012.
If tax-evading people do not respond to the notices and fail to pay the tax, the NBR will freeze their bank accounts for ensuring tax collection, the NBR chief said.
The revenue administration is expecting to collect Tk 1,000 crore from the move through bringing these people under the tax net, he said.
A large section of house owners earn huge amount of money from house rent and businesses but they evade taxes and many of them even do not have TINs though they have
taxable income, officials involved in the survey said.
The number of tax-evading owners will be manifold when the survey will be completed across the country. Till now, most of the detected tax-dodgers are from Dhaka.
The main purpose of issuing the notice is to bring the house and business entity owners under tax net and the NBR do not have any intention to harass or frighten them, the officials said.
They said the building owners would also be asked to disclose their source of income, how did they build houses or buy apartments as they did not pay income tax years after years.
If they deny complying with the notices, they will have to face legal actions, the officials said adding that field offices had already started serving notices to house owners in limited scale under article 93 of Income Tax Ordinance-1984 but from July the activities would go on in full scale.
According to an estimation made by the NBR, considering the size of the economy and middle-class people of the country, at least 60 lakh people should pay income tax while 5 lakh business entities should pay value-added tax.
But, Hussain said, only 13 lakh people paid income tax and 60,000 business houses paid VAT in the last fiscal year.
In this context, the revenue board started a door-to-door survey to detect tax-evading house and apartment owners, and business entities across the country and from December 18. Officials of the 31 tax zones of the NBR started visiting houses and business entities.
The tax officials also collected information from the local government authorities, utility service providing agencies and other-related organisations to identify tax dodgers.
-With New Age input
