Dhaka: The National Board of Revenue (NBR) is going to establish two new zones and more than 100 new upazila offices across the country, aiming to improve the tax-GDP ratio to 15.3 by 2019 from its currently poor level of 10 percent.

‘The new tax zones will be set up in Jessore and Kusthia,’ a senior official of NBR said.

He said the NBR has decided to introduce 103 tax offices in upazila level for improving the tax collection without imposing new tax or increase the tax rate. ‘The necessary steps for setting up these new offices are under process,’ he said.

The official mentioned that the NBR has already established 37 tax offices in upazila level that have revenue potentiality.

‘These offices will help the revenue collecting authority to increase the number of taxpayers to a great extent,’ he said.

Currently, the number of taxpayers in the country is 29,28,093. These taxpayers provide 37 percent of the total revenue. The government is in a move to increase this ratio to 50 percent by 2020-21.

According to an official document, the number of income tax return in 2016-17 has been increased by four lakh comparing to the previous fiscal (2015-16).

‘Some nine lakh new taxpayers have been registered (took Taxpayers Identification Number) in the first nine months of the last fiscal,’ it stated.

‘The government is taking these steps to improve revenue collection from the income tax wing,’ the NBR official said.

Besides, the NBR is going to form two units—‘tax at source unit’ and ‘tax information unit’. The government has given green signal to form these two units.

The NBR official said that the new zones, offices and units are the part of the government’s initiative to find out new pockets for gathering additional taxes.

‘As a result the attention will be on the collection of more money from existing pockets as well as finding out new avenuse to improve the revenue collection,’ he said.

The target for the NBR in the current fiscal has been set at Tk 2,48,190 crore while the target of Non-NBR tax revenue collection has been fixed at Tk 8,662 crore. The target of non-tax revenue collection has been set at Tk 31,179 crore.

The NBR has to collect Tk 86,867 crore from income tax and corporate tax, Tk 91,344 crore will come from VAT while Tk 30,153 crore will come from import and export duty and Tk 38,212 crore will be generated from supplementary duty.

According to the data released by the NBR, revenue collection increased by 19 percent to Tk 185,003 crore in the last fiscal year (2016-17) compared to the previous year.