Surcharge Imposition
NBR yet to get DoE list of polluting industries
The National Board of Revenue could not execute the provision of collecting environment surcharge from the polluting factories even after one month of introduction of the law due to lack of the list of such units, officials said. Department of Environment was supposed to provide the list of polluting industries by July 13 to the NBR, but the office of the environment and forest ministry is yet to provide the list despite repeated request, they said.
In absence of the names of polluting factories, the revenue board cannot collect the surcharge though the provision came into effect from July 1, the first day of the fiscal year of 2014-15, according to NBR officials.
The government in the budget imposed one per cent surcharge on the prices of the products produced by polluting factories.
The revenue board has already sent three official letters to the DoE for sending the names of such factories.
In addition, officials of the value-added tax wing of the NBR talked several times with the DoE officials and had a meeting on July 2 on preparing the list.
The meeting decided that DoE would provide the list by 7 working days and the revenue board would issue the gazette notification containing the names of the polluting factories.
It also decided that the factories which had earlier been penalised for violating the Environment Conservation Act-1995 would be considered as polluting industries.
The revenue board will include or exclude the names of factories from the list from time to time if any new factory is identified as polluting one or becomes compliant, according to the decision of the meeting.
Officials of the DoE informed that they failed to provide the list in time as they had no updated data of polluting factories and they were working on preparing the lists.
The revenue board may not get the surcharge for the month of July as it is yet to issue gazette notification containing the names of polluting factories that may create legal complications in future, they said.
‘Further delay in getting the list may intensify the complications in execution of the law as more than one month of the fiscal year has already been passed without imposing and collecting the surcharge,’ a high official of the NBR told New Age on Sunday.
According to the provision of the Finance Act-2014, the surcharge is supposed to collected with the value-added tax on products produced by environment polluting factories.
Factories calculate VAT instantly at production stage that means the revenue board will not get the surcharge for July that may create legal complexity, he said.
The revenue board may soon seek personal intervention of environment ministry secretary Shafiqur Rahman Patwary in this regard, he added.
-With New Age input
