National Board of Revenue chairman Ghulam Hussain on Saturday expressed dissatisfaction over the performance of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR), saying there are discretions in any part of NBR for which thousands of tax disputes have been filed with courts.
He said the NBR is established with law and there are minimum chances of discretion at the revenue body. “But why a huge number of cases have become disputed?” he questioned.
There must be discretion somewhere which resulted in such a huge number of tax disputes and this is my failure as the chairman of NBR, he said.
Ghulam Hussain made the observation at a workshop on alternative dispute resolution on income tax in Dhaka. The NBR and the International Finance Corporation jointly organised the workshop.
He said no case related to customs and VAT wings was resolved through ADR since its introduction.
More than Tk300bn of revenue remained stuck due to the backlog in cases with different courts. Among them, Tk40bn are from income tax, Tk240bn from customs and Tk20bn from VAT wing.
“A huge amount of money would add to the national exchequer if taxpayers settle their disputes through the ADR,” the chairman said.
The NBR on July 2012 introduced the ADR to resolve the disputes and ensure a win-win situation for both the government and taxpayers. According to the system, a panel of facilitators will assist both taxpayers and revenue officials to resolve disputes within two months of application.
During the last one year, ADR received only 212 cases from income tax, among them, 197 cases have been settled so far and NBR realised around Tk650m, out of total 6.03bn after settlement of the cases.
“There are 10,000 customs related cases involving Tk260bn, but ADR has attracted only 35 of them. Why they are not coming?” the chairman questioned.
To deal with such cases, he stressed on introduction of an own legal wing at NBR consisting NBR members, senior lawyers, and retired district judges etc.
“We have only one legal officer to handle over 30,000 cases. Due to the lack, no representative monitors the cases pending at the courts, even no one attends the hearing, and since we cannot present the cases properly at court, we lose cases.”
He also emphasised on introducing incentive for the lawyers, saying if there are provisions for their incentives at ADR,lawyers will be involved with the process and encourage people to settle disputes through ADR.
NBR member (legal and enforcement) Kalipada Halder presented the keynote paper at the workshop.
Participants expressed confusion over the transparency of the system and said if the facilitator is selected from retired officials of NBR, the designated persons will surely have soft corner on NBR. They requested NBR to review the provision if possible. They also emphasised on providing power to the facilitators saying if the facilitator works with no power, there will be less chances to win the cases.
In response, Kalipada Halder said it is tough to manage senior lawyers to deal with ADR. However, the NBR will consider giving power to facilitators while amending the law next time.