Business Report :
National Board of Revenue (NBR) Chairman Md Abdur Rahman Khan on Monday said that the government would try to introduce single rate VAT system in the country in a bid to reduce the leakage in revenue collection.
“It’ll be better for us if we can go for a single rate VAT to reduce the leakage in revenue collection and it will also be very easy to administer. Definitely we’ll try for that,” he said.
The revenue board chief said this while addressing a press conference on the occasion of VAT Day 2024 at the conference room of the NBR in the capital.
The theme of this year’s VAT Day is “We all will pay VAT and take participation in development”.
Rahman said that NBR would try to scrap the VAT exemption gradually to improve the VAT collection. “But, it does not mean that this has to be done right now. We’ll do that in consultation with the stakeholders,” he said.
He said that the NBR would supervise the VAT net and would also bring those who are now currently outside the VAT net.
“We’ve to expand our tax net at the quickest possible time. If we can expand the VAT net, then we’ll be able to reduce the revenue collection gap that already took place in the first five months of the current fiscal year,” he said.
The NBR chairman said that the country is now going through some tough economic time. “If we want to recover our country from this economic situation and thus advance further, we don’t have any other option.”
Asking the VAT officials to work with utmost honesty and sincerity, Rahman said that for the sake of the welfare of the mass people, the government has waived various types of taxes, reports BSS.
“As a result, the revenue collection has suffered in the last couple of months. So, there is no alternative to reducing the tax waiver.”
Rahman said that whenever the economic situation of the country improves, then it has to try to increase the revenue collection.
“We’re going towards that direction. We’ll rationalise the tax waiver, we’ve already started our job. Already we’ve scrapped some SROs and some others are in the pipeline,” he added.
The NBR chairman reiterated his call to get rid of the culture of tax exemption. “Otherwise, we won’t be able to increase our revenue collection.”
