IMF team asks NBR officials to increase revenue collection

Staff Reporter :
The visiting International Monetary Fund (IMF) team has asked to know structural reforms so far the National Board of Revenue (NBR) taken to accelerating the tax collection in the current fiscal year.

The team raised the issue during a meeting with the senior NBR officials on Monday, sources said.

On the day, the IMF officials meet the officials of the three wings of the tax administration to know about its revenue collection strategy and how to meet current fiscal year’s revenue target attached to the IMF’s loan.

But the NBR officials could not give satisfactory answers to the queries of the IMF delegation, according to source.

The visiting IMF team will again sit with NBR officials today (Tuesday).

Earlier, on January 30 this year, the board meeting of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) approved a loan of $4.7 billion for the country.

The IMF will disburse the loans in seven installments until 2026, with the first tranche of $476.2 million released on 30 January and the second installment will due in November.

According to IMF’s loan conditions, the NBR has to adopt tax revenue measures to yield an additional 0.5 per cent of GDP in the FY24 budget.

For this, the IMF also set some conditions such as rationalizing tax expenditure with measures to be adopted in the budget.

In order to increase the tax GDP ratio to 0.5 per cent by meeting the IMF’s target, NBR will have to collect Tk 24,600 crore more in income tax, value added tax or VAT and customs sector.

In a PowerPoint presentation to IMF team, NBR’s Income Tax Department said that in FY24 Tk 3000 crore will be collected from land registration.

Besides, travel tax and environmental surcharge will generate Tk 500 crore and TK 300 crore respectively.

According to presentation by the VAT Wing showed that Tk 2,350 crore will be collected through the increase in the tax rate of cigarettes, and Tk 1,200 crore will be raised by removing and reducing the exemption of mobile phones, polypropylene staple fiber, ball point pen, software, LPG which is 0.8 percent of tax GDP ratio.

According to the plan in the Customs Department, dues collection of Tk 8,802 crore dues from Petrobangla, Tk 1, 245 crore will be collected as a result of change in import duty rate and Tk 1,503 crore through other measures will contribute to rise 0.23 percent of the GDP ratio.