The National Board of Revenue (NBR) is set to adopt a new technique based on 'business-customs partnership' in a bid to increase revenue collection by preventing tax-dodging tricks.
Under the new method, the NBR will utilise the existing businessmen and their trade bodies in unearthing tax dodgers.
“This system is effective and worked in many places around the world,” NBR Member (Customs and VAT Administration) M Farid Uddin told the news agency on Monday.
He said business-customs partnership is a new idea in the financial world and this has been proved effective in catching the evaders.
The NBR will sit with the leading businessmen and trade bodies from different sectors and request them to provide information about the "culprits" who are dodging tax.
“An importer of a specific item, for example, knows better than the NBR officials about the same item imported by dodging or paying less duty,” he said about using the decoy to detect dodgers.
Farid Uddin said the selling price of an item would not be the same when the item was imported by dodging duty. That means the honest importer will be incurring loss for the dishonest importer. “We will take this kind of incident as our hitting point,” he said.
The affected importer will be the source of information for the NBR.
Describing the reason for taking such technique, the NBR member said the revenue authority of the government suspected that due to wrong declaration of the importers the revenue-collecting agency of the government is losing a hefty amount of money.
“According to the new rule we cannot go for 100 percent verification of the imported items,” he said.
After introducing the pre-shipment inspection (PSI) system, the customs officials could go for physical verification of only 10 percent of the imports.
He also said it would not be viable for the customs officials to go for full physical verification. This will slow the release of imported goods from the port, Farid Uddin added.
The NBR prepares to discuss the issue among the businesses and their trade bodies.
The NBR is going to adopt such technique as the government fears less revenue from import duty in the days to come.
The revenue generation from imports will suffer more as the World Trade Organisation (WTO) is heading towards a duty-free world, levelling the frontiers on the economic globe.
Finance Minister AMA Muhith, who has targeted some Tk 61,000 as revenue income in the current budget, had emphasised improving the revenue collection by any means during his visits to the NBR several times.
He had also directed the NBR to find out the pockets from where the government could earn revenues.