Staff Reporter

The National Board of Revenue (NBR) will install 10,000 Electronic Fiscal Devices (EFDs) in Dhaka, Chattogram and other big cities in the fiscal year 2022-23 in a bid to prevent Value Added Tax(VAT) evasion.

Finance minister AHM Mustafa Kamal in the proposed budget of 2022-23 kept an allocation to install EFDs in different chain and super shops.

EFD is an improved version of Electronic Cash Register or ECR, which is imported by the NBR. If EFD is used in business, VAT money will be automatically transferred to the main server of NBR.

In this system, the traders cannot hide the sale information and the real information of daily transactions will be transferred to the NBR server which will help to reduce fraud, NBR sources said.

In the budget speech, the finance minister 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."

Since then 4,595 machines have been installed. A total of 10,000 EFD machines are planned to be installed in various businesses by June 2023.

"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 earning will be increased all retail and wholesale businesses are brought under the machine system, they said.