Revenue board to install 10,000 EFD to thwart VAT dodging

The National Board of Revenue (NBR) will install 10,000 electronic fiscal devices (EFDs) in fiscal 2022-23 in a bid to prevent evasion of value added tax (VAT).

Finance Minister AHM Mustafa Kamal in the proposed budget for FY23 kept an allocation to install EFDs in different chain and super shops in Dhaka, Chattogram and other big cities.

EFD is an improved version of electronic cash register or ECR, which is imported by the National Board of Revenue (NBR).

If EFD is used in business, VAT money will be automatically transferred to the main server of the revenue board.

In this system, the traders will not be able to hide the sale information and the real information of daily transactions will be transferred to the revenue board server which will help reduce fraud, officials concerned said.

“In order to increase revenue collection in various types of retail and wholesale businesses, two years ago, in the budget of 2020-21, for the first time, a state-of-the-art electronic fiscal device system was introduced,” said the finance minister while placing the national budget before the parliament on Thursday.

“We are in the process of setting up the machine through outsourcing as well as keeping the programme running. As a result of this step, I hope that the collection of VAT will reach the desired level by 2026,” he added.

In this year’s budget, the target for total revenue collection through NBR is Tk 3.70 lakh crore. Of this, Tk1.36 crore will come from VAT, which is 37 percent of the total collection.

Officials at the NBR’s VAT department said huge amounts of VAT are evaded at the retail and wholesale levels.

Revenue earnings will increase if all retail and wholesale businesses are brought under the machine system, they said.