In a bid to increase revenue collection and ensure there is no tax evasion in the entertainment sector of the country, the National Board of Revenue (NBR) has recently started scanning the tax files of the persons related with entertainment business.
“We are getting interesting information from this sector, I won’t disclose any particular name, but there is some information that tax evasion is going on there,” a highly placed NBR official told UNB.
He said they have got suspicious information about some actors and actresses and are now checking those. “The information in their (actor and actress) tax files does not match with their bank statements and lifestyle.”
The NBR official also mentioned that there are some persons in the entertainment sector whose information in the tax files matched with their bank accounts and lifestyle.
Many in the entertainment sector do not even have Taxpayers Identification Number (TIN), he said.
Recently, the Central Intelligence Cell (CIC) of the NBR instructed all banks and financial institutions (FIs) to check details about account information of three leading performers of the country. They are Touquir Ahmed, his wife Bipasha Hayat, and Mahfuz Ahmed.
The NBR suspects that these performers concealed information in their tax files.
The CIC smells tax evasion in those tax files after a thorough scrutiny of the wealth information, the NBR official said.
He mentioned that the NBR so far received some details from banks, but they have not calculated the amount of the tax payable by them.
The official said there might be tax evasion on their business income as those performers are running profitable commercial firms along with their regular performance.
He informed that the NBR is listing the business firms of the artists to find out any tax evasion by them.
“We are not telling that all of them (artists) evade taxes willingly, but we are trying to identify if there are some lapses regarding paying taxes by the artists,” the NBR official said.
He mentioned that some artists often go to various programmes as anchor or announcer and where they get per diem. “This is also taxable, but many of them don’t know that… we’ll inform them that such incomes are also under tax net,” he said.
The official also said that there are some persons in the entertain sector like other professions who deliberately evade taxes.
“Punishment will be as per rules how big he or she might be,” he said when asked about the punishment if any artist is found evading tax.
The government has set Tk 1.12 trillion as the revenue collection target for the NBR during the current fiscal (2012-13). Of this annual target, the government expects 36 percent of revenue to come from value added tax (VAT), 31.5 percent from income tax, 17.8 percent from supplementary duty and 12.9 percent from import duty.
According to the government data, there are some 1.2 million people in the country who pay income tax.
Source: UNB Connect