Dhaka: The National Board of Revenue (NBR) has undertaken an initiative to prepare a list of taxpayers whose outstanding taxes have accumulated to significant amounts.

‘We are preparing a list of taxpayers whose due taxes have piled up to huge amounts,’ a senior official of the NBR told UNB on condition of anonymity.

He said that the NBR took the initiative for enhancing revenue collection as the first half of the current fiscal has passed, during which its income tax wing managed to collect Tk 20,583 crore.

NBR has got a gigantic target of Tk 176,370 crore revenue collection for the 2015-16 fiscal, up from the Tk 136,266 crore that it managed to collect last year.

This year, the target was set to collect Tk 64,971 crore from income tax, while Tk 64,262 crore from VAT and Tk 18,752 crore from import duty. The target for export duty has been fixed at Tk 37 crore, excise duty at Tk 1,239 crore and supplementary duty at Tk 25,875 crore.

The NBR official said that if they could prepare the list properly it would be a great help for the revenue collecting authority to achieve the target for the current fiscal.

‘In the first half of the fiscal we have collected one third of the target; that means we have to work hard to achieve our goal, I think the preparation of the list can help us a lot to fetch a good amount of revenue,’ he said.

Responding to a query regarding the total amount of piled up unpaid taxes, the NBR official said that the total amount cannot be ascertained before completion of the list.

‘But I can tell you the amount will not be negligible at all,’ he said.

According to the NBR, the number of pending income tax, VAT and customs cases in the High Court is 22,747, while the amount related with the cases is Tk 25,783 crore.

Of the total, the number of income tax-related cases is 2711 involving Tk 7,413 crore. Some 17,470 import duty-related cases are pending at the High Court involving Tk 4,835 crore, while the number of VAT-related cases is 2566 involving Tk 13,534 crore.

The NBR high official mentioned that after preparing the list NBR might go for Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) as this system is quicker and more effective.

‘The Board in a recent meeting put special emphasis on the ADR to dispose the revenue-related disputes,’ he said.

The NBR introduced ADR on July 1, 2012 to accelerate the disposal of revenue-related cases through out-of-court settlements.

Some 375 cases related to import duty have so far been settled through ADR involving Tk 119.87 crore. The number of income tax-related cases settled through ADR is 305, relating to some Tk 115 crore.