Inland Revenue eyes Rs. 300 b target in 2007

Anjana Samarasinghe

REVENUE: The Department of Inland Revenue targets over Rs. 300 billion through revenue collection in 2007 and are confident of achieving their target of Rs. 260 billion by the end of this year.

Commissioner General of the Department of Inland Revenue A.A. Wijepala told Daily News they have collected over Rs. 230 billion up to now and confident on achieving this year's target.

The Department expects Rs. 100 billion through income tax for the total revenue of the Department next year.

Next year the Department aims to open 50,000 new files to expand the tax net. This year the Department has targeted 30,000 new files.

'This time we are focusing on importers to expand the tax net and the Department has found that large quantities of sugar, potatoes, dried chilies, and dhal has been imported during this year to the country, he said. 'Most of these importers are not in the tax net and action will be taken to expand tax net for these importers too.

'There are some importers who do their imports only on festive seasons, importers who import clothing from countries such as India and Indonesia during the festive season.

Though they do their import once a year they earn a large amount of money for the whole year. We will focus on this segment too, he said.

He also said the Department has conducted programmes to educate traders who are not familiar with the tax systems in the country.

The Department is in the process of focusing on private tuition class masters and night club owners who are high earners.

The Government revenue collector also suffered from the shortage of tax officers and Department will fill all vacancies by January next year.

There are 250 new officers and 251 officers have been appointed as tax officers who worked in the department .

We expect to appoint another group of officers in January to fulfil our vacancies, the Commissioner General said.

Tax payers are now satisfied with the services offered by the Department and there is a significant improvement in tax refunds and the Department is now in a position to settle these tax refunds, he added.