Al Amin :
The National Board of Revenue (NBR) has taken proactive measures to dispose of value-added tax (VAT) cases by June this year to meet the revenue collection gap.
The revenue board thinks that the existing revenue collection gap could be minimised through disposing of the litigation and intensifying monitoring.
Following this, the government agency sent a letter to four VAT commissionerates in Dhaka recently directing them to clear up all the VAT evasion-related cases filed between 2017 and 2022 by the end of this fiscal year.
In the letter, the revenue board also sought explanations as to why these cases have been pending for a long time, and it has been ordered to send a report stating who had the responsibility for the unwanted prolongation, NBR officials said.
According to data from the revenue board, over Tk24,641 crore of VAT revenue, which contributes 37 percent to total taxes, is trapped in 10,301 pending litigations until January this year.
Of the litigation, 27 cases are pending in the Vat Appeal Commissionerate, 202 cases in the Appellate Tribunal, 3486 cases in the High Court Division, and 139 cases in the Appellate Division, while 3559 cases are certificate-related, 1582 cases are under Article 14.1, and 35 cases are pending at the Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) department of the NBR.
There are 1271 more cases involving Tk 2063 crore, the data showed.
There are three benches in the High Court division to dispose of tax-related cases.
Moinul Khan, Member for VAT Implementation and IT at the NBR, told The New Nation, “The NBR has taken various initiatives to reduce the tangle of cases.
Field offices have been directed to speed up the disposal of cases through a more effective ADR (alternative dispute resolution) system. It has been possible to reduce cases a little more than before.”
“The existing revenue collection deficit could be minimised through settling the litigation and intensifying monitoring,” he added.
The revenue authority aims to collect Tk 4.10 lakh crore in the current fiscal year, focusing mainly on indirect taxes such as VAT.
The data also showed that 139 cases involving Tk 68.50 crore were settled only in January this year, while another 171 new ones involving Tk 279.69 crore were filed in the first month of this calendar year.
The NBR officials said that a major portion of the VAT-related cases are pending in the High Court Division as it takes a long time to settle the lawsuits due to the insufficient number of court benches.
They also alleged that most of the businesses go to the courts to delay paying the due taxes. As a result, the tax-related cases have been unsettled for years after years.
