National Board of Revenue has decided in principle to extend the deadline for registering with electronic Taxpayers Identification Number (eTIN) by another spell of three months due to poor responses from the taxpayers, officials said.
They said the deadline has earlier been extended for three months till March 31, but desired number of taxpayers did not turn up to be netted under the eTIN. Only around 1.8 lakh taxpayers have been registered with the system as of yesterday since starting of the extension on January 1.
There are 17 lakh valid TIN holders in the country. Of them, over 11 lakh could be brought under the eTIN so far.
“NBR is now contemplating to extend the deadline again till June 30,” a senior official told Dhaka Tribune yesterday. The new deadline is expected to be announced on March 31 when the existing deadline expires.
He said the NBR is planning to extend the deadline to brought remaining taxpayers.
Among the eTIN holders, some 8.79 lakh are old taxpayers who have re-registered with eTIN and the remaining are the new taxpayers.
The officials said the newly formed special cell, which was established only to deal with the eTIN related issues are now working on facilitating the taxpayers to be reregistered with eTIN.
The revenue authorities introduced the system on July 1 to boost revenue collection, reduce hassles and prevent issuance of fake TINs.
With the new system, the existing 10-digit TIN will be replaced with 12-digit ones. According to the newly introduced system, computer generated TIN certificates will be issued as soon as the application procedure is completed online.