EFDs installed in 25,741 establishments till April

Electronic fiscal devices (EFDs) have been set up in 25,741 establishments in Bangladesh till April this year to facilitate tax payments by service providers and businesspeople, according to the budget documents for FY25.

More such machines will be installed nationwide in phases, the document mentioned.

This will enhance transparency, accountability, and monitoring within the value-added tax regulatory framework, according to the government commitments made in the 'Budget for FY24' and 'Snapshot of Implementation Progress'.

Centrally registered entities and those with annual gross sales or turnover of Tk 5 crore or more are now required to maintain their accounts using an automated, software-based system, it said.

Finance Minister Abul Hassan Mahmood Ali today placed a Tk 797,000 crore national budget for the upcoming fiscal year in parliament.

The FY25 budget is 4.6 percent larger than the current budget, which is much lower than the average year-on-year spike of 11 percent seen over the past five years.

The current fiscal year's budget was 12.35 percent larger than the previous one.

The implementation of EFDs would enable revenue officials to see real sales data of businesses as the technology is connected with the EFD management systems at the NBR.

This is the second attempt by the revenue administration to boost VAT collection using sales monitoring technology.

Its first initiative, which was to popularise the electronic cash register (ECR) in 2007-08, failed to generate interest among users.

The buzz died down a couple of years after its introduction due to a lack of enforcement and an unholy nexus between revenue officials and traders.

Another problem was that there was no scope to monitor whether traders were showing actual transactions as the ECRs were not connected to any central system of the NBR.

So the revenue authorities took the initiative to replace ECRs with EFDs in 2017.

It floated a tender in December 2018 to buy the machines and systems and then placed an order to buy 10,000 EFDs initially out of a planned 100,000 from a consortium of China-based SZZT and Synesis IT of Bangladesh.

The purchase price of each EFD was Tk 32,000.

In August 2020, the revenue authorities launched EFDs on an experimental basis in five VAT Commissionerates in Dhaka and Chattogram with a target to install EFDs in 10,000 stores by June 2021.