Finance Minister AHM Mustafa Kamal yesterday reiterated that the main goal of the present government is to boost the revenue collection and thus increase the tax-GDP ratio without harming the valued taxpayers.
"We'll boost our revenue collection without hurting or harming the taxpayers. At the same time, we don't expect that the taxpayers won't pay taxes as per their capacity," he said. Finance Minister was talking to reporters after attending a meeting with the high officials of the Finance Division and the members and commissioners of the VAT and customs at the NEC conference room in city's Sher-e-Bangla Nagar area.
After assumption of his office as the new Finance Minister, Kamal said he had been sitting with the concerned stakeholders like the businessmen and the concerned officials on how to address the problems and thus overcome those to boost the overall revenue generation. "Our main goal is to raise the revenue collection. We're still lagging behind in the tax-GDP ratio and we have to have a prosperous growth in the tax-GDP ratio through addressing the barriers. We're taking all measures to attain that target," he added.
Kamal said there is a need for necessary manpower and necessary automation to attain that goal while the government will construct the necessary infrastructure to expand the operations of the NBR up to upazila level through setting up tax offices.NBR Chairman Mosharraf Hossain Bhuiyan, Finance Secretary Abdur Rouf Talukder, among others, attended the meeting.
He said that the revenue administration has already identified those sources and sectors from where the government has not been getting taxes at a desired level side by side where lies the distortions and inconsistencies.
Finance Minister said that the Income Tax, VAT and Customs departments would work in a more firm way to run the tax administration and management and thus attain the desired goal.He also informed that the government would go for large-scale scanning in case of exports and imports of all kinds of goods and machineries like raw materials, capital machineries, spare parts and intermediaries.