Undisclosed money legalisation facility should stay
The planned withdrawal of supplementary duty on more than 1,000 imported products from July 1, 2015 will cause a revenue loss of Tk 600 crore a year, the National Board of Revenue chairman Ghulam Hussain said on Wednesday. ‘We have to reduce the list of products for imposing supplementary to only 170 from existing 1,362 from next July due to international norm of customs,’ he said at a pre-budget discussion with the economic reporters’ forum at the revenue board.
Led by ERF president Sultan Mohammad Badal, the ERF leaders and members focused on issues like black money whitening facility, property tax, revenue leakage, tax incentive for the promotion of investment and duty–free import of luxury cars.
Ghulam said they would try to make up the loss of the supplementary duty by generating higher revenue from the income tax.
‘Income tax will be top source of revenue from next fiscal,’ he said, adding that the next fiscal would be very crucial for the board.
The NBR chairman said legalisation of the undisclosed income should not be stopped although such provision in the stock market and real estate sector in the outgoing fiscal did not pay any dividend in the outgoing fiscal year.
He pointed out that opportunity should be there for tapping undisclosed money. Even the rich and developed countries like the U.S, Canada, Malaysia offered benefits to tap undisclosed money.
‘Many Bangladeshis have already sought second home in Malaysia,’ he said, adding that the practice should be checked to curb capital flight.
He said tax from property owners, especially from the landlords in Dhaka, Chittagong and others big cities, could be raised only when the transaction between landlords and tenants would be completed through banking channel.
He said the government was tying to introduce the system as 162,000 landlords in the major cities across the country do not pay any tax. He said 90 per cent of the county’s physicians, lawyers and engineers evaded tax. He admitted that weakness of the NBR officials was a major reason for the widespread tax evasion.
Ghulam said the NBR would assess valuation of land as per income tax law to plug loopholes in tax and duty evasion in land and property business from the next fiscal year.
He said there would be an effort to strike a balance between corporate and personal income tax in the new fiscal year. He observed that big gap between two types of income tax was forcing many businessmen to form group of companies to evade income tax.
The NBR chairman said subsidy for the industry should be stopped. He said subsidy regime should not continue for long, noting that subsidy nowadays was an extra income for many businessmen.
The NBR would increase tax on industries which are hazardous for public health and the environment. It
would give additional incentive for the industrialists to set up industries outside the capital. As of last March, NBR was lagging behind by Tk 5,000 crore from its revised target of Tk 84,892 crore. The gap was almost doubled in last December due to political unrest in the run up to the national election.
Ghulam said they were trying to reduce the gap further in the next three months.
-With New Age input
