The government may distribute Electronic Cash Register (ECR) and Point of Sales (POS) machines among traders to prevent evasion of value-added tax.
The traders, who are eligible to use such electronic machines, have to collect those machines mandatory from the government and use them at their selected stores, so no traders can evade the VAT or manipulate the transaction records, said officials.
The government is planning to introduce the system in the wake of rampant VAT evasion across the country.
The National Board of Revenue (NBR) will file cases against those eligible traders who are not using these compulsory machines in their own stores, said officials.
While unveiling budget for the fiscal year 2016-17 on June 2, Finance Minister AMA Muhith said: “The government will collect the ECR and Point of Sales (POS) machines by itself and will deliver them to the companies.”
He also proposed the government to amend the existing rules and orders to make it mandatory for all the super resorts, hotels and companies to use the ECR and POS.
In July 2009, NBR made it mandatory for 11 types of business to install and use ECR and POS software to boost VAT collection.
The business entities include hotels, restaurants, sweetmeat shops, furniture outlets, beauty parlours, community centres, all shops located at the mega malls in the metropolis, departmental stores, general stores, big and medium-size wholesalers and retailers and jewellers.
The finance ministry’s fiscal coordination council also decided to bring all the shops of those cited categories under the system. The new VAT law, which will fully come into effect from July 2017, will make it compulsory to use ECR machines in shops and other businesses.
According to an NBR estimate, there are now 11,005 shops under the categories. Of them, a total of 8,559 were selected for ECR installation but so far only 2,970 machines were installed in the country.
Liberation War Affairs Minister AKM Mozammel Haque recently urged the government to provide Electronic Cash Register (ECR) machines for the traders, who are not able to pay the machine price instantly, through installments for the effective use of the mechanism across the country.
He also suggested the government to make it mandatory to use ECR or POS for traders to help government earn higher amount of revenues.
The government in 2009 introduced the technology to thwart evasion of VAT collected from the consumers by the shopkeepers as the manual system of accounting used at the outlets leaves room for tax evasion.
It is, however, widely reported that a large number of businesses skip the machine installation but many of those, who have installed the machines, also do not use them in transactions blaming their machines as faulty.
Against such a backdrop, the revenue authorities is now working to connect its server system with the ECR machines to get real time record of the machines to get the actual amount of VAT collected by business entities from their customers.
According to the plan, NBR will install a chip in each ECR which will be directly connected with the IVAS server. Thus, the NBR officials will be able to cross check the transaction records any time.
By doing so, the revenue authority is expected to get the actual amount of VAT as no traders will be able to alter the records because of introducing the new system, said officials.
Source: Syed Samiul Basher Anik @ DhakaTribune
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