Al Amin :
According to data from the National Board of Revenue (NBR), over Tk24,641 crore in Value-Added Tax (VAT) revenue, which constitutes 37 percent of total taxes, is currently entangled in litigation.
Officials report that the revenue board is exerting considerable efforts to expedite the resolution of these legal disputes.
As of January this year, NBR data reveals that VAT worth Tk24,641 crore remains unpaid in 10,301 pending cases across different courts. Among these litigations, 27 cases are pending in the Vat Appeal Commissionerate, 202 cases in the Appellate Tribunal, 3486 cases in the High Court Division, 139 cases in the Appellate Division.
Additionally, 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 and in the other cases there are 1271 involving Tk 2063 crore, the data showed.
Moinul Khan, Member for VAT Implementation and IT at the NBR, told The New Nation, “NBR has taken various initiatives to reduce the tangle of cases.
Field offices have been directed to speed up 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 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 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 remaining unsettled for years after years.
Experts, however, said there has been a gap in communication between the NBR and the attorney general’s office, and this has to improve in order to quickly resolve the cases stuck in higher courts.
The revenue board has managed to earn Tk 63074 crore from the VAT wing till January against the annual target of Tk 1,51,700 crore.
The VAT wing achieved a 15.95 per cent growth in collecting the indirect tax during the first seven months (July-January) period of the current fiscal year, even amid the slowed economic activities caused by Covid-19 pandemic and Russia-Ukraine war.
“This progress was made due to an increase in monitoring and expanding the VAT net among more businesses,” said Moinul Khan.
