The National Board of Revenue's (NBR) online tax payment facility has received a poor response so far.

Since the launch of the e-payment gateway in collaboration with Sonali Bank, the NBR has received only Tk 1.40 crore as income tax from individual taxpayers.

The collection from customs and value added tax (VAT), which accounts for 70 percent of NBR's receipts, remains very low: Tk 28 lakh from customs and none from VAT.

Kanon Kumar Roy, a director general of NBR's Directorate of Inspection, said the amounts for customs duty and VAT payment are usually higher, say Tk 5 lakh and above, and hence the low e-payment turnover.

The absence of online banking facility by all banks makes it unfeasible to pay such big amounts through the e-payment gateway.

Additionally, NBR's slow preparations in the lead-up to the launch of the portal have failed to get banks that have online banking service on board with the e-payment initiative.

The acceptance of only Q-Cash cards by the web portal explains the overall underwhelming response.

Another reason cited by the taxpayers and stakeholders is the unreliability of the online server as the 'verify challan' option of the web portal does not always show up.

The NBR is yet to address the shortcomings five months after Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina had inaugurated the portal in an effort to reduce the hassles taxpayers encounter with the manual tax payment system.

Official of firms -- electronic payment processor Q-cash, Sonali Bank and software developers Datasoft and Technovista -- blamed the lack of coordination among the implementing and monitoring officials at NBR for these issues remaining unresolved to date.

"We are not comfortable with the system. It requires us to open accounts with Sonali Bank as not all banks have the online banking facility that allows bank transfers," said a senior official of a mobile network operator.

Apart from the problems, the NBR is yet to establish a central server for data hosting, and there is no help desk or call centre to answer to the taxpayers' queries and guide them through the system.

Currently, taxpayer's queries sent by e-mail remain unattended; the NBR's last response to taxpayers' queries was on June 9, according to the e-payment.

"I placed queries twice. But I did not get any feedback," said Md Abdur Rouf, a taxpayer who also gave his phone number for getting feedback.

“Later, I paid taxes manually,” he said.

"As far as I know, no initiative has been taken from the NBR to encourage firms to pay VAT online," said a senior official of Q-cash who preferred to remain unnamed.

Roy, who coordinated the development and launch of the e-payment service, said the NBR is working to get all banks on board.

"We have issued pre-paid cards for those who do not own Q-Cash cards," said an official of Sonali Bank, preferring to remain unnamed.

"The pre-paid cards also allow taxpayers to pay tax as much as they want as there is no transaction limit for a single entry," he added.

Mahfuzul Alam, who manages the software development for NBR in favour of Technovista Ltd, said the NBR has to speed up its efforts to bring all banks to the e-payment scheme so that all debit and credit cards can be used for tax payment.

Khandokar Khurshid Kamal, who now coordinates the monitoring of NBR's e-payment facility, said it takes time to stabilise any system.

"We will sit with the stakeholders to solve all problems by this month," he said.

Manjur Mahmud, chief operating officer of Datasoft Systems Bangladesh Ltd, said a central server has to be established, while all the software have to be brought under the same operating platform.

He called for dedicated help desk and supporting the professional groups -- tax lawyers, clearing and forwarding agents -- to popularise the service.

News: The Daily Star/Bangladesh/11-Nov-12