National Board of Revenue (NBR) Chairman Md Abdur Rahman Khan on Tuesday said in the upcoming national budget they will prioritise easing non-tariff barriers to facilitate business people.

“We will try to ease the non-tariff barriers for you, we will remove all hurdles from your path, that is our main target, we are working on it,” he said at a pre-budget meeting held at the conference room of the Revenue Building in the capital.

He said the primary goal of the budget for the next fiscal year will be creating a business-friendly environment for entrepreneurs.

“The target is to enhance revenue collection, providing comfort to the business people through creating a congenial atmosphere for them by pulling out all obstacles,” said the NBR chief.

He pointed out the significant gap between the official tax rate and the effective rate in many cases, saying, “We will try to ease that.”

Abdur Rahman said that for the business entities that do not have any accounting system, the NBR is planning to develop an app so that they can do their accounting properly.

“They will preserve all sorts of records in that app, which will ultimately help them to calculate their taxes, including the VAT properly,” he said.

The NBR chief said that the ultimate objective of this organisation is to increase revenue collection, widen the tax net and contain revenue evasion, which is the main cause of revenue leakage.

“We have to reduce our tax expenditure to zero,” he said.

He said that for those who are paying taxes at a reduced rate and have had tax exemption for a long time, the time has come for them to pay taxes at actual rates.

“It is the time to keep aside the tax exemption culture. There will be some tax exemptions, of course, but that will be for the sake of encouraging new investments,” he said.

Abdur Rahman also put emphasis on tariff rationalisation and said that it should be done.

He said that there are some problems regarding tariff valuation and HS Code and the NBR will try to address these separately.