Undisclosed Gold: Traders given chance to legalise it at low tax
Gold traders and jewellers will be able to legalise their undeclared stock of gold and other precious metals by paying a low tax, reads a National Board of Revenue (NBR) notification on Tuesday.
According to the NBR notification if any trader wants to disclose their undeclared stock of gold, they will have to pay Tk 1,000 per bhori. In case of cut and polished diamond, the tax will be at Tk 6,000 per carat. Besides, the authorities fixed the tax for silver at Tk 50 per bhori.
The offer will stay until June 30, 2019, read the gazette.
The tax benefits will be given to the traders after they fulfil certain terms and conditions, said the NBR.
Kanon Kumar Roy, member of tax policy at the NBR, said, “We will not raise any question about the source of gold if they [traders] declare their stock by the deadline.”
Almost all jewellers have gold in stock that they cannot show in their income tax returns as they do not have valid sources of purchasing those, Roy said, adding that this first came into notice after Apan Jewellers failed to show their papers to the Customs Intelligence and Investigation Directorate.
In November last year, the government framed a new gold policy to make import and export of the precious metal easy and transparent.
The NBR, in its notice, said traders will have to maintain inventories of declared gold, silver and diamond in separate books. Sales from the inventories should also be recorded in separate books. The traders will have to submit these books along with income tax returns.
Ganga Charan Malakar, president of Bangladesh Jewellers’ Samity, said the government’s decision would yield good results.
According to Malakar, more than 50,000 jewellers and gold traders across the country. Of them, there are 1,500 in Dhaka.
The annual demand for gold in Bangladesh is between 20 and 40 tonnes. Almost 80 percent of it is met by smuggled gold as traders face difficulties in importing the precious metal due to its complex procedure, according to Gold Policy 2018.
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