Finance Minister AMA Muhith on Monday called upon the people to pay taxes to help develop the country as the Income Tax Fair 2013 began in Dhaka.
“I request the public to pay income tax on a regular basis since it’s our national duty,” he said, inaugurating the week-long annual event at the Officers Club premises.
The minister said the trend of income tax payments has changed over the time as the people are now interested in paying taxes.
The revenue authorities are expecting to get around 150,000 tax returns at this year’s event, which is fully automated, said National Board of Revenue Chairman Ghulam Hossain. Last year, around 100,000 returns were submitted.
Besides the Dhaka event, 54 district headquarters will observe two-day fair and seven divisional headquarters will observe it for seven days. One day mobile fair will be held at the three hilly districts.
To facilitate tax related transactions and to help the visitors, 16 booths, 44 E-TIN registration booth, two E-Payment booth, 72 return filing booth, 50 help desks, 2 emergency health booths were set up at the fair premises in Dhaka.
There are booths of Sonali Bank and Janata Bank to facilitate financial transactions. The fair will remain open for visitors from 10am to 6pm. The visitors would be offered to get the electronic TIN registration instantly.
Last year, the revenue body observed the fair at 18 locations and collected Tk8.31bn in income tax from the fair. A total of 346,867 people received services from the fair and the board had received tax returns from 97,867 taxpayers. Fresh TIN was issued to 16,287 people.
On the first day, the revenue body bagged over Tk320m in revenue. A total of 32,354 people received services from the fair and the board received returns from 7,454 taxpayers. Fresh TIN was issued to 764 people.
Due to some technical error, the E-TIN registration and re-registration process, however, suffered for a short period of time. NBR officials said the database server of the Election Commission was down for a while. As the NBR uses the EC database to verify information, they had to face the problem. However, the problem was solved within a short period of time.
