NBR Chairman Md Abdur Rahman Khan. File Photo

DHAKA, April 15, 2025 (BSS) - National Board of Revenue (NBR) Chairman Md Abdur Rahman Khan today said that the main focus of the national budget for next fiscal year (FY26) would be removing the non-tariff barriers to facilitate the business community.

“We’ll try to ease the non-tariff barriers for you (businessmen), we’ll remove all the hurdles from your path and that is our main target. We’re working on that,” he said while speaking at a pre-budget meeting.

The meeting was held at the conference room of the Revenue Building at Agargaon area in the capital today.

The NBR chief said that the target for the next budget would be creating a business-friendly environment for the entrepreneurs.

“The target is to enhance revenue collection, providing comfort to the business people through creating congenial atmosphere for them through removing all the obstacles. We’re working to this end,” he said.

He also said that sometimes there is a huge gap between the tax rate and the effective tax rate. “We’ll try to ease that,” he added.

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

“They’ll 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 Chairman said that the ultimate objective of the revenue board is to enhance the revenue collection, widen the tax net further and contain the revenue invasion, which is the main cause for revenue leakage.

“We have to reduce our tax expenditure to zero,” he said.
In this connection, Rahman said that time has come for those, who are paying taxes in reduced rate and having tax exemptions for a long time, to pay taxes at actual rates.

“It is high 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 Khan also put emphasis on tariff rationalization saying that it should be done.

“We’re trying from this year (FY25) to address the issue.” he said.
He said that there are some problems regarding tariff valuation and HS Code while the NBR would try to address the matters separately.