National Board of Revenue holds a meeting today with income tax commissioners of Dhaka zone to discuss how to keep collection unaffected by the ongoing political unrest.
Officials said the revenue collection has been disrupted largely due to continuous blockades and hartals throughout the country, said tax officials.
“Collections have dropped by quite a large amount as political situation remains worsening,” an NBR official told the Dhaka Tribune.
This fiscal the target has been set to collect about Tk137,000 crore. But according to officials, the unabated political turmoil has made the target almost impossible to achieve.
At the meeting, discussions will be held on strengthening monitoring system like carrying out surveys and field-level inspections to pick up collections, said official sources.
NBR earlier postponed several meetings on tax collection situation due to the intensified political crisis.
“Many tax commissioners from across the country were unable to participate in the scheduled meetings in Dhaka due to blockades and shut-downs called by the opposition alliance,” said an official.
“Sunday’s (today) meeting will be attended only by income tax commissioners of Dhaka Zone.”
The official added the works to determine the target of revenue collection on the basis of the revised budget has already been underway.
“The meeting will deal with the only the revised revenue target.”
He said the meeting is also set to develop a constructive strategy to improve revenue earning.
Tax offices previously blamed “lack of logistics and shortage of manpower” for the failure in achieving revenue collection target. This issue is also kept in the meeting’s agenda, said the sources.
NBR’s July-November collection fell Tk6,000 crore short of target, showed a provisional data.
