The step is expected to speed up the ECR installation process which was time-consuming
In order to simplify the installation of electronic cash register or point of sales machines, the National Board of Revenue authorities have empowered field offices to approve the process.
The move comes in response to the requests made by the field-level customs, excise and VAT commissionerates, and the traders, according to officials.
The step is expected to speed up the ECR installation process which was, earlier, time-consuming and discouraging for traders.
As per the current procedure, after setting up of the system, a shopkeeper needs to inform respective NBR field office by seven days.
Then, an NBR committee visits the shop to make sure that the machine installed has the features of not erasable and not alterable memory settings.
The shop can only use the machine after the committee’s approval.
But as the approval process is said to be a lenghty and cumbersome process, this would discourage many traders to embrace the system and have revenue collection to reach the fiscal year’s target hampered.
The NBR, on February 15, issued an order amending the earlier process, giving the power of approval to field offices.
A team of official equivalent to post of additional or joint commissioner, concerned divisional official, and concerned revenue officer can make visits and approve the ECR installation, in addition to the existing central approval procedure, the order said.
NBR officials said the machines will have to include mechanism for keeping entry of sales records and that have to be not erasable.
They said there would have to be a permanent power back-up system or an immediate battery back-up in case of power outage.
In July 2009, the NBR made it mandatory for 11 types of business to install and use ECR machine and POS software to boost the VAT collection.
The businesses include hotels, restaurants, sweetmeat shops, furniture outlets, beauty parlours, community centres, all shops located at mega malls in the metropolis, departmental stores, general stores, big and medium-size wholesalers and retailers at the metropolis and jewelers.
The technology was introduced to prevent evasion of VAT collected from the consumers by the shopkeepers as the manual system of accounting used at the outlets leaves room for tax evasion.
It is, however, widely reported that a large number of businesses skip the installation while many of those, who have installed, also do not use it in transactions blaming the machine as flawed.
The revenue board, earlier, targeted to bring all the shops of those cited categories under the system by January 15 as per a decision made by the finance ministry’s fiscal coordination council.
However, many business establishments and traders remained without the system even after the deadline.
According to an NBR estimate, there are now 11,005 shops under the categories. Of them, a number of 8,559 were selected for ECR installation. But only 2,970 of the shops selected have embraced the mechanism so far.
NBR Chairman Nojibur Rahman recently told the Dhaka Tribune that the board had decided to extend the deadline.
He said the board was in discussion with traders, business chambers and associations seeking their cooperation to make the efforts a success.
The NBR targets to collect Tk1,76,370 crore revenue, including Tk64,262 crore as VAT, this fiscal year.
