Staff Correspondent

Bangladesh Bank (BB) in an explanation of its actions erasing billions of dollars from the country's export earnings account has said the National Board of Revenue (NBR) and the Export Development Bureau (EPB) are responsible for duplication in export data.

As a result, the verification system of the central bank has found duplicate data totaling an estimated $23 billion over 20 months spanning the last two financial years.

The BB has given this explanation in an official letter to the government. The letter stated that with this large deficit, various financial statistics of the country have been turned upside down.

The current account has gone from surplus to deficit due to a decline in exports. And as the target of repatriated remittances against exports fell, the fiscal account turned from deficit to surplus.

In that letter, the central bank said that in a meeting, the representative of NBR had already observed that there are multiple export accounts for exporting the same goods which were imputed as new in the server.

Bangladesh Bank collects export earnings data from branches of scheduled banks. As a result, there is not much difference between the data and the actual export.

Identifying the reasons for the discrepancy between the export data collected by the BB and published by EPB, the regulator said the same export data and HS code of the product were inputted multiple times.

In terms of cutting, making, and trimming of the product, only manufacturing charges are to be paid, but EPB has accounted for all parts including fabric. EPB has sometimes also input the price of the sample product, which is not supposed to come as a price of the sample product, said BB in the letter.