Revised tax target to fall short by big margin
The National Board of Revenue (NBR) is on course to missing its collection target by a big margin once again this fiscal year, increasingly leaving the government dependent on bank borrowing and foreign sources to fund its budget.
In the first 11 months of fiscal 2018-19, the tax collector managed Tk 191,958 crore, meaning a staggering Tk 88,105 crore has to be collected in June to hit the target, which has already been revised downwards seeing the sluggish receipts.
The receipts are an increase of 6.97 percent from a year earlier, the lowest in 18 years, according to data from the NBR.
Both tax revenue and non-tax revenue collection have missed their respective targets by a significant margin during the first half of the fiscal year, said the Centre for Policy Dialogue earlier this month in its review on the state of the Bangladesh economy.
The think-tank forecasted the revenue shortfall come the year’s end would be about Tk 85,000 crore.
This would be the seventh year since fiscal 2012-13 that the government will miss its revenue collection target.
In fiscal 2017-18, collections missed the target of Tk 225,000 crore by Tk 22,686 crore, Finance Minister AHM Mustafa Kamal said on Sunday.
The latest collection figure quoted by him though differs by Tk 15,211 crore from the one put in the budget documents by the finance ministry on June 13: the NBR’s total collection was shown to be Tk 187,103 crore in fiscal 2017-18.
The discrepancy has given rise to questions of data engineering by the government.
Officials of finance division said the data gap takes place every year as the finance division collects data from the office of the Comptroller and Auditor General of Bangladesh, where there is a data gap with the NBR.
The CPD in its analysis on the budget for fiscal 2019-20 also raised the issue of discrepancy in tax collection data between the NBR and finance ministry.
The NBR’s collection figures are always higher than the ones shown by the finance ministry. “NBR data is used in the budget speech to report the revenue growth trend. Is it to show a better picture?”
“Data discrepancy constantly becomes a problem for us,” said Fahmida Khatun, research director of the CPD, at a dialogue on the budget on Sunday held at the capital’s Lakeshore Hotel.
