FE Report

The National Board of Revenue (NBR) has received a poor response from the individual taxpayers. The number of tax returns submitted until Wednesday was about half of the same the Board got last year.

November 1 is the last day of tax return submission. We do not have any plan to extend the deadline, said National Board of Revenue (NBR) Chairman Nasiruddin Ahmed in a press conference in the city Wednesday.

The government has already stretched the time by one month from the original deadline, September 30, at the request of different sections of people, he said.

Responding to a question on next course of action against the non-filing of tax returns, the NBR chief said: "Deputy commissioner of taxes can extend the time for a taxpayer on request made before the deadline."

There is a law to impose penalty of Tk 1000 at a time and Tk 50 per day on those who will fail to submit tax returns by the deadline.

Usually, the NBR gets 75 per cent tax returns from the individual taxpayers in the last two-three days, said NBR member (tax policy) Aminur Rahman.

The NBR is expecting a higher number of tax returns this year than that of the previous

tax year, he said.

Last year, the NBR received a total of 0.65 million returns involving a payment Tk 7.39 billion tax by the deadline on November 12.

It was found that a large number of individual taxpayers thronged different tax offices Wednesday to submit their tax returns before expiry of the deadline.

"We have requested the Bangladesh Bank (BB) to keep all banks open Saturday (October 31). On Sunday (November 1), transactions in banks will continue until 5.0 pm instead of 4.00 pm," the NBR chief said.

All the tax offices will also remain open until 8.00 pm on November 1, he said.

The NBR chief said the response to the opportunity offered to disclose undisclosed income is still poor but it would increase after the expiry of deadline for individual tax return submission.

"There is scope to disclose the income until June 30, 2010. We are trying to make people aware of the opportunity," he said.

In the current fiscal, the government offered the money whitening scheme for three sectors -- share market, real estate and setting up of new industries.

"We hope that people will respond to the offer and make investment because the government will not verify the declared source of the invested money," Dr. Nasir said.

About the list of non-taxpaying members of parliament (MPs), the NBR chairman said: "The NBR is yet to receive this kind of list from anywhere."

In the press conference, the NBR chief revealed the revenue collection data of the first quarter (July-September) where the NBR posted a 9.0 per cent growth.

Of the three wings, income tax and Value Added Tax (VAT) posted 26 per cent and 16 per cent growth respectively while customs attained a negative growth of 3.0 per cent.